THE LORDS 

OF THE GHOSTLAND 



EDGAR SALTUS 




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Book__ 
Copyright N°_ 



Jji 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE LORDS 
OF THE GHOSTLAND 

A History of the Ideal 

By 
EDGAR SALTUS 



' Errons, les doigts unis, dans 
I'Alhambra du songe." 

Ren]Se Vivien 




NEW YORK 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 

MCMVII 



Copyright, 1907 
BY EDGAR SALTUS 



!BHARY of CONGRESS 
Two Goaies ft«:eived 

iSU 8 190? 

Gooyr?srht Entrv 



i» Cooy 
CLAtf. ^ _ 



■^- 't'T 






r^ Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 





THE LORDS 




. 


OF THE GHOSTLAND 




I 


Brahma 


7 


n 


Ormuzd 


39 


III 


Amon-Ra 


60 


IV 


Bel-Marduk 


81 


V 


Jehovah 


109 


VI 


Zeus 


140 


vn 


Jupiter 


166 


mi 


The Nee Plus Ultra 


189 



THE LORDS 
OF THE GHOSTLAND 



BRAHMA 

THE ideal is the essence of poetry. 
In the virginal innocence of the 
world, poetry was a term that meant 
discourse of the gods. A world grown 
grey has learned to regard the gods as 
diseases of language. Conceived, it may 
be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, 
they were but deified words. Yet, it is 
as children of beauty and of dream that 
they remain. 

''Mortal has made the immortal,'' the 
Rig-Veda explicitly declares. The mak- 
ing was surely slow. In tracing the 
genealogy of the divine, it has been 
[7] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

found that its root was fear. The root, 
dispersed by Hght, ultimately dissolved. 
But, meanwhile, it founded religion, 
which, revealed in storm and panic, for 
prophets had ignorance and dread. The 
gods were not then. There were demons 
only, more exactly there were diabolized 
expressions invented to denominate 
natural phenomena and whatever else 
perturbed. It was in the evolution of 
the demoniac that the divine appeared. 
Through one of time's unmeasurable gaps 
there floated the idea that perhaps the 
phenomena that alarmed were but the 
unconscious agents of superior minds. 
At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatiza- 
tion of nature began in which the gods 
were born, swarms of them, nebulous, 
wayward, uncertain, that, through further 
gaps, became concrete, became occa- 
sionally reducible to two great divinities, 
[8] 



BRAHMA 

earth and sky, whose union was imagined 
— a hymen which the rain suggested — 
and from which broader conceptions 
proceeded and grander gods emerged. 

The most poetic of these are perhaps 
the Hindu. At the heraldings of newer 
gods, the lords of other ghostlands have, 
after batthng violently, swooned utterly 
away. But though many a fresher faith 
has been brandished at them, apatheti- 
cally, in serene indifference, the princes 
of the Aryan sky endure. 

It is their poetry that has preserved 
them. To their creators poetry was 
abundantly dispensed. To no other 
people have myths been as frankly 
transparent. To none other, save only 
their cousins the Persians, have fancies 
more luminous occurred. The Persians 
so polished their dreams that they en- 
tranced the world that was. Poets can 
[9] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

do no more. The Hindus too were poets. 
They were children as well. Their first 
Usp, the first recorded stammer of Indo- 
European speech, is audible still in the 
Rig-Veda, a bundle of hymns tied to- 
gether, four thousand years ago, for the 
greater glory of Fire. The worship of 
the latter led to that of the Sun and ignited 
the antique altars. It flamed in Persia, 
lit perhaps the shrine of Vesta, after- 
ward dazzled the Incas, igniting, mean- 
while, not altars merely, but purgatory 
itself. 

In Persia, where it illuminated the 
face of Ormuzd, its beneficence is told in 
the Avesta, a work of such holiness that 
it was polluted if seen. In the Rig-Veda, 
there are verses which were subsequently 
accounted so sacred that if a soudra over- 
heard them the ignominy of his caste was 
effaced. 

[10] 



BRAHMA 

The verses, the work of shepherds who 
were singers, are invocations to the dawn, 
to the first flushes of the morning, to the 
skies' heightening hues, and the vermilHon 
moment when the devouring Asiatic sun 
appears. There are other themes, minor 
melodies, but the chief inspiration is 
Hght. 

To primitive shepherds the approach 
of darkness was the coming of death. 
The dawn, which they were never wholly 
sure would reappear, was resurrection. 
They welcomed it with cries which the 
Veda preserves, which the Avesta retains 
and the Eddas repeat. The potent forces 
that produced night, the powers potenter 
still that routed it, they regarded as beings 
whose moods genuflexions could affect. 
In perhaps the same spirit that French- 
men assisted at a lever du roi, and Eng- 
lishmen attend a prince's levee, the Aryan 
[11] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

breakfasted on song and sacrifice. It 
was an homage to the rising sun. 

The sun was deva. The Sanskrit root 
diVy from which the word is derived, pro- 
duced deus, devi, divinities — number- 
less, accursed, adored, or forgot. The 
common term appUed to all abstractions 
that are and have been worshipped, means 
That which shines and the name which, 
in the early Orient, signified a star, desig- 
nates the Deitv in the Occident to-dav. 

Apologetically, Tertullian, a Christian 
Father, remarked: ''Some think our God 
is the Sun." There were excuses per- 
haps for those that did. Adonai, a He- 
brew term for the Almighty, is a plural. 
It means lords. But the lords indi- 
cated were Baahm who were Lords of the 
Sun. Moreover, when the early Chris- 
tians prayed, they turned to the East. 
Their holy day was, as the holy day of 
[12] 



BRAHMA 

Christendom still is, Sunday, day of the 
Sun, an expression that comes from the 
Norse, on whom also shone the light of 
the Aryan deva. 

To shepherds who, in seeking pasture 
for their flocks, were seeking also pasture 
for their souls, the deva became Indra. 
They had other gods. There was Agni, 
fire; Varuna, the sky; Maruts, the tem- 
pest. There was Mitra, day, and Yam a, 
death. There were still others, infantile, 
undulant, fluid, not infrequently ridicu- 
lous also. But it was Indra for whom 
the dew and honey of the morning hymns 
were spread. It was Indra who, emerg- 
ing from darkness, made the earth after 
his image, decorated the sky with con- 
stellations and wrapped the universe in 
space. It was he who poured indiffer- 
ently on just and unjust the triple torrent 
of splendour, light, and life. 
[13] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

Indra was triple. Triple Indra, the 
Veda says. In that description is the 
preface to a theogony of which Hesiod 
wrote the final page. It was the germ of 
sacred dynasties that ruled the Aryan and 
the Occidental skies. From it came the 
grandiose gods of Greece and Rome. 
From it also came the paler deities of 
the Norse. Meanwhile ages fled. Life 
nomad and patriarchal ceased. From 
forest and plain, temples arose; from 
hymns, interpretations; from prayer, 
metaphysics ; for always man has tried to 
analyze the divine, always too, at some 
halt in life, he has looked back and found 
it absent. 

In meditation it was discerned that 
Indra was an effect, not the cause. It 
was discerned also that that cause was not 
predicable of the gods who, in their un- 
dulance and fluidity, suggested ceaseless 
[14] 



BRAHMA 

transformations and consequently some- 
thing that is transformed. 

The idea, patiently elaborated, re- 
sulted in a drainage of the fluid myths 
and the exteriorisation of a being entirely 
abstract. Designated first as Brahmana- 
spati. Lord of Prayer, afterward more 
simply as Brahma, he was assumed to have 
been asleep in the secret places of the sky, 
from which, on awakening, he created 
what is. 

The conception, ideal itself, was not, 
however, ideal enough. The labour of 
creating was construed as a blemish on 
the splendour of the Supreme. It was 
held that the Soul of Things could but 
loll, majestic and inert, on a lotos of azure. 
Then, above Brahma, was lifted Brahm, 
a god neuter and indeclinable; neuter as 
having no part in life, indeclinable be- 
cause unique. 

[15] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

There was the apex of the world's most 
poetic creed, one distinguished over all 
others in having no founder, unless a 
heavenly inspiration be so regarded. But 
the apex required a climax. Inspiration 
provided it. 

The forms of matter and of man, the 
glittering apsaras of the vermillion dawns, 
Indra himself, these and all things else 
were construed into a bubble that Brahm 
had blown. The semblance of reality in 
which men occur and, with them, the days 
of their temporal breath, was attributed 
not to the actual but to Maya — the magic 
of a high god's longing for something 
other than himself, something that should 
contrast with his eternal solitude and fill 
the voids of his infinite ennui. From 
that longing came the bubble, a phantom 
universe, the mirage of a god's desire. 
Earth; sea and sky; all that in them is, all 
[16] 



BRAHMA 

that has been and shall be, are but the 
changing convolutions of a dream. 

In that dream there descended a scale 
of beings, above whom were set three 
great lords, Brahma the Creator, Vishnu 
the Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer, col- 
lectively the Tri-murti, the Hindu trin- 
ity expressed in the mystically ineffable 
syllable Om. Between the trinity and 
man came other gods, a whole host, 
powers of light and powers of darkness, 
the divine and the demoniac fused in a 
hierarchy surprising but not everlasting. 
Eventually the dream shall cease, the 
bubble break, the universe collapse, the 
heavens be folded like a tent, the Tri- 
murti dissolved, and in space will rest but 
the Soul of Things, at whose will atoms 
shall reassemble and forms unite, dis- 
unite and reappear, depart and return, 
endlessly, in recurring cycles. 
[17] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

That conception, the basis perhaps of 
the theory of cosmological days, is per- 
haps also itself but a dream, yet one that, 
however defective, has a beauty which 
must have been too fair. Brahma, 
Vishnu, Siva, originally regarded as ema- 
nations of the ideal, became concrete. 
Consorts were found for them. From 
infinity they were lodged in idols. A 
worship sensuous when not grotesque 
ensued, from w^hich the ideal took flight. 

That was the work of the clergy. 
Brahmanism is also. The archaic con- 
flict between light and darkness, the 
triumph of the former over the latter, 
diminished, at their hands, into the figura- 
tive. That is only reasonable. It was 
only reasonable also that they should 
claim the triumph as their own. Without 
them the gods could do nothing. They 
would not even be. In the Rig -Veda 
[18] 



BRAHMA 

and the Vedas generally they are trans- 
parent. The subsequent evolution of the 
Paramatma, the Tri-murti and the hier- 
archy, had, for culmination, the apo- 
theosis of a priesthood that had invented 
them and who, for the invention, de- 
served the apotheosis which they claimed 
and got. They were priests that were 
poets, and poets that were seers. But 
they were not sorcerers. They could not 
provide successors equal to themselves. 
It was the later clergy that pulled poetry 
from the infinite, stuffed it into idols and 
prostituted it to nameless shames. 

In the Bhagavad-Gita it is written: 
" Nothing is greater than I. In scriptures 
I am prayer. I am perfume in flowers, 
brilliance in light. I am life and its 
source. I am the soul of creation. I am 
the beginning and the end. I am the 
Divine." 

[19] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

That is Brahm. Ormuzd has faded, 
Zeus has passed. Jupiter has gone. 
With them the divinities of Egypt and 
the lords of the Chaldean sky have been 
reabsorbed and forgot. Brahm still is. 
The cohorts of Cyrus might pray Ormuzd 
to peer where he glowed. There, the 
phalanxes of Alexander might raise altars 
to Zeus. Parthians and Tatars might 
dispute the land and the god. Muham- 
madans could bring their Allah and 
Christians their creed. Indifferently 
Brahm has dreamed, knowing that he 
has all time as these all have their 
day. 

The conception of that apathy, gran- 
diose in itself and marvellous in its per- 
sistence, was due to unknown poets that 
had in them the true souffle of the real 
ideal. But that also demanded a climax. 
They produced it in the theory that the 
[20] 



BRAHMA 

afl3ictions of this life are due to trans- 
gressions in another. 

From afflictions death, they taught, is 
not a release, for the reason that there 
is no death. There is but absorption in 
Brahm. Yet that consummation cannot 
occur until all transgressions, past and 
present, have been expiated and the soul, 
lifted from the eddies of migration, be- 
comes Brahm himself. 

To be absorbed, to be Brahm, to be 
God, is an ambition, certainly vertigi- 
nous yet as surely divine. But to suc- 
ceed, consciousness of success must be 
lost. A mortal cannot attain divinity un- 
til annihilation is complete. To become 
God nothing must be left of man. To 
loose, then, every bond, to be freed from 
every tie, to retire from finite things, to 
mount to and sink in the immutable, to see 
Death die, was and is the Hindu ideal. 
[21] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

Of the elect, that is. Of the higher 
castes, of the priest, of the prince. But 
not of the people. The ideal was not for 
them, salvation either. It was idle even 
to think about it. Set in hell, they had to 
return here until in some one of the 
twenty-four lakhs of birth which the 
chain of migrations comports, and which 
to saint and soudra were alike dispensed, 
they arrived here in the purple. Then 
only was the opportunity theirs to rescale 
a sky that was reserved for prelates and 
rajahs. 

Suddenly, to the pariah, to the hopeless, 
to those who outcast in hell were outcast 
from heaven, an erect and facile ladder to 
that sky was brought. The Buddha fur- 
nished it. If he did not, a college of dis- 
sidents assumed that he had, and in his 
name indicated a stairway which, set 
among the people, all might mount and 
[22] 



BRAHMA 

at whose summit gods actually material- 
ized. 

To those who believe in the Dalai 
Lama — there are millions that have be- 
lieved, there are millions that do — he is 
not a vicar of the divine, he is himself 
divine, a god in a tenement of flesh who, 
as such, though he die, immediately is 
reincarnated ; a god therefore always pres- 
ent among his people, whose history is a 
continuous gospel. In contemporaneous 
Italy, a peasant may aspire to the papacy. 
In the uplands of Asia, men have loftier 
ambitions. There they may become Bud- 
dha, who perhaps never was, except in 
legend. 

In the Lalita Vistdra the legend un- 
folds. In the strophes of the poem one 
may asist at the Buddha's birth, an event 
which is said to have occurred at Kapila- 
vastu. Oriental geography is unac- 
[23] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

quainted with the place. With the thing 
even Occidental philosophy is famihar. 
Kapilavastu means the substance of 
Kapila. The substance is atheism. 

History has its hesitancies. Often it 
stammers uncertainly. But its earliest 
pages agree in representing Kapila as the 
initial religious rebel. Kapila was the 
first to declare the divine a human and 
invalid conjecture. The announcement, 
with its prefaces and deductions, is con- 
tained in the Sankhya Karika, a system 
of rationalism, still read in India, where 
it is known as the godless tract. 

In the Orient, existence is usually a 
sordid nightmare when it does not happen 
to be a golden dream. Kapila taught 
that it was a prison from which release 
could be had only through intellectual 
development. That is Kapilavastu, the 
substance of Kapila, where the Buddha 
[24] 



BRAHMA 

was born. In the Lalita Vistdra it is 
fairyland. 

There, Gotama the Buddha is the 
Prince Charming of a sovereign house. 
But a prince who developed into a nihilist 
prior tore-becoming the god that anteriorly 
he had been. It was while in heaven that 
he selected Maya, a ranee, to be his 
mother. It was surrounded by the heav- 
enly that he appeared. The fields foamed 
with flowers. The skies flamed with 
faces. In the air apsaras floated, fanning 
themselves with peacocks' tails. The gal- 
leries of the palace festooned themselves 
with pearls. On the terraces a rain of 
perfume fell. In the parterres Maya 
strolled. A tree bent and bowed to her. 
Touching a branch with her hand she 
looked up and yawned. Painlessly from 
her immaculate breast Gotama issued. 
An immense lotos sprouted to receive 
[25] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

him. To cover him a parasol dropped 
from above. He, however, already oc- 
cupied, was contemplating space, the 
myriad worlds, the myriad lives, and an- 
nounced himself their saviour. At once 
a deluge of roses descended. The efful- 
gence of a hundred thousand colours 
shone. A spasm of delight pulsated. Sor- 
row and anger, envy and fear, fled and 
fainted. From the zenith came a mur- 
mur of voices, the sound of dancing, the 
kiss of timbril and of lute. 

That is Oriental poetry. Oriental 
philosophy is less ornate. From the 
former the Buddha could not have come. 
From the latter he probably did, if not 
in flesh at least in spirit. To that spirit 
antiquity was indebted, as modernity is 
equally, for the doctrines of a teacher 
known variously as Gotama the Enlight- 
ened and Sakya the Sage. Whether or 
[26] 



BRAHMA 

not the teacher himself existed is, there- 
fore, unimportant. The existence of the 
Christ has been doubted. But the doc- 
trines of both survive. They do more, 
they enchant. Occasionally they seem 
to combine. The Gospels have obviously 
nothing in common with the Lalita Vis- 
tdra^ which is an apocryphal novel of un- 
certain date. The resemblance that is 
reflected comes from the TripitaJca, the 
Three Baskets that constitute the evangels 
of the Buddhist faith. 

In an appendix to the Mahavdggo^ it 
is stated that disciples of Gotama, who 
knew his sermons and his parables by 
heart, determined the canon '"after his 
death.'' The expression might mean any- 
thing. But a ponderable antiquity is 
otherwise shown. Asoko, a Hindu em- 
peror, sent an embassy to Ptolemy Phila- 
delphos. The circumstance was set forth 
[27] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLIXD 

bilingually on various heights. In an- 
other inscription Asoko recommended 

the study of the Tripitaha and mentioned 
titles of the books. Ptolemy Philadel- 
phos reigned at Alexandria in the early 
part of the third century B.C. The Tripi- 
taha must therefore have existed then. 
But the thirty-seventh year of Asoko 's 
reign vras, in a third inscription, counted 
as the two hundred and fifty-seventh from 
the Buddha's death, a reckoning which 
makes them much older. Their existence, 
however, as a fourth inscription shows, 
was oral. Transmitted for hundreds of 
years by trained schools of reciters, it 
was during a s^iiod that occurred in the 
first quarter of the first century before 
Christ that, finallv, thev were written. 

In them it is recited that Mava, the 
mother of Gotama, was immaculate. 
According to St. Matthew, Maria, the 



BRAHMA 

mother of Jesus, was also. Previously, 
in each instance, the coming of a Messiah 
had been foretold. The infant Jesus 
was visited by magi. The infant Buddha 
was visited by kings. Afterward, neither 
Jesus or Gotama wrote. But both 
preached charity, chastity, poverty, hu- 
mility, and abnegation of self. Both 
fasted in a wilderness. Both were 
tempted by a devil. Both announced a 
second advent. Both were transfigured. 
Both died in the open air. At the death 
of each there was an earthquake. Both 
healed the sick. Both were the light of a 
world which both said would cease to be. 
According to LuJce, a courtesan visited 
Jesus and had her sins remitted. Accord- 
ing to the Mahdvaggo, Gotama was 
visited by a harlot whom he instructed 
in things divine.^ In Matthew, Jesus is 

^ Luke vii. 37-50. Sacred Books of the East, xi. 30. 
[29] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

depicted as a glutton and a wine-bibber. 
In the Mahdvaggo, the picture of Gotama 
is the same.^ In Matthew it is written; 
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures on 
earth, where moth and rust doth con- 
sume and where thieves break through 
and steal/' The Khuddakapatho says: 
"Righteousness is a treasure which no 
man can steal. It is a treasure that 
abideth alway."^ In Luke it is written: 
"As ye would that men should do unto 
you, do ye also unto them." The Dham- 
maphada say: "Put yourself in the place 
of others, do as you would be done by."^ 
The miracle of walking on the water, 
that of the money-bearing fish, the story 
of the Woman at the Well, the proclama- 
tion of an unpardonable sin, even the 
mediaeval myth of the Wandering Jew, 

^ Matthew xi, 19. S. B. E. xiii. 92. 

2 Matthew vi. 19. S. B. E. x. 191. 

3 Luke vi. 31. S. B. E. x. 36. 

[30] 



BRAHMA 

may have originated in Buddhist 
legend.^ 

Pious minds have been disturbed by 
these similitudes. The resemblance be- 
tween Maya and Maria has perplexed. 
The perhaps uncertain likeness of Gota- 
ma to Jesus has occasioned irreverent 
doubts. But the parallelisms may be 
fortuitous. Probably they are. Even 
otherwise they but enhance the sororal 
beauties of faiths which if cognate are 
quite distinct. Then too the penetrating 
charm of the parables and sermons of the 
Buddha fades before the perfection of 
the sermons and parables of the Christ. 
The birth, ministry, transfiguration, and 
passing of Gotama are marvels which, 
however exquisite, the wholly spiritual 
apparitions of the Lord efface. 

Other similarities, such as they are, may 

*C/. Edmunds: Buddhist and Christian Gospels. 
[31] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

without impropriety, perhaps, be attributed 
to the ideals progressus. Hindu and 
Chaldean beliefs constitute the two primal 
inspirational faiths. From the one, Bud- 
dhism and Zoroasterism developed. From 
the other the creed of Israel and possibly 
that of Egypt came. Religions that fol- 
lowed were afterthoughts of the divine. 
They were revelations sometimes more 
intelligible, in one instance inexpressibly 
more luminous, yet invariably reminis- 
cent of an anterior light. 

The light of contemporaneous Bud- 
dhism is that of Catholicism— heaven de- 
ducted, a heaven, that is, of ceaseless 
Magnificats. The latter conception is 
Christian. But it was Persian first. 
Otherwise, in common with the Church, 
Buddhism has saints, censers, litanies, 
tonsures, holy water, fasts, and confession. 
Barring confession, the extreme antiquity 
[32] 



BRAHMA 

of which has been attested, the other 
rites and ceremonies are, it may be, 
borrowed, but not the high morality, the 
altruism, the renunciation and efface- 
ment of self, which Buddhists no longer 
very scrupulously observe, perhaps, but 
which their religion was the first to instil. 

Buddhism originally had neither rites 
nor ritual. It was merely a mendicant 
order in which one tried to do what is 
right, with, for reward, the hope of 
Pratscha-Paramita, the peace that is 
beyond all knowledge and which Nirvana 
provides. That peace is — or was — the 
complete absence of anything, extinction 
utter and everlasting, a state of absolute 
non-existence which no whim of Brahm 
may disturb. 

Buddhism denied Brahm and every 
tenet of Brahmanism, save only that 
which concerned the immedicable misery 
[33] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

of life. Of final deliverance there was in 
Brahmanism no known mode. None at 
least that was exoteric. Brahmanism 
rolled man ceaselessly through all forms 
of existence, from the elementary to the 
divine, and even from the latter, even 
when he was absorbed in Brahm, flung 
him out and back into a fresh circle of 
unavoidable births. 

The theory is horrible. In the horrible 
occasionally is the sublime. To Gotama 
it was merely absurd. He blew on it. 
Abruptly, the categories of the infinite, 
the infant gods, shapes divine and de- 
moniac, the entire phantasmagoria of 
metempsychosis, seemed really absorbed 
and Brahm himself ablated. For a mo- 
ment the skies, sterilized by a breath, 
seemingly were vacant. Actually they 
were never more peopled. Behind the 
pall, tossed on an antique faith, new gods 
[34] 



BRAHMA 

were crouching and waiting. Buddhistic 
atheism had resulted but in the produc- 
tion of an earlier New Testament. From 
the depths of the ideal, swarms of bedecked 
and bejewelled divinities escorted Brahm 
back to a lotos of azure. Coincidentally 
Gotama, enthroned in the zenith, con- 
templated clusters of gods that dangled 
through twenty-eight abodes of bliss 
which other poets created. 

In demonstrable triumph the Buddha 
was then, as he has been since, even if 
previously his existence had been omitted. 
But though he never were, there never- 
theless occurred a social revolution of 
which he was the nominal originator and 
which, had it not been diverted into other 
realms, might have resulted in Brahm 's 
entire extinction. 

Wolves do not devour each other. 
Ideals should not either. The Oriental 
[35] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

heavens were wide enough to serve as 
fastnesses for two sets of hostile, germane, 
and ineffably poetic aberrations. There 
was room even for more. There always 
should be. Of the divine one can have 
never enough. 

The gospel according to Sakya the 
Eremite is divine. It is divine in its 
limitless compassion, and though com- 
passion, when analyzed, becomes but 
egotism in an etherialized form, yet the 
gospel had other attractions. In dem- 
onstrating that life is evil, that rebirth is 
evil too, that to be born even a god is evil 
still, — in demonstrating these things, while 
insisting that all else. Buddhism included, 
is but vanity, it fractured the charm of 
error in which man had been confined. 

Sakya saw men born and reborn in 
hell. He saw them ignorant, as human- 
ity has always been, unaware of their ab- 
[36] 



BRAHMA 

jection as men are to-day, and over the 
gulfs of existence, through the torrents 
of rebirth, he offered to ferry them. But 
in the ferrying they had to aid. The aid 
consisted in the rigorous observance of 
every virtue that Christianity afterward 
professed. Therein is the beauty of Bud- 
dhism. Its profundity resided in a revela- 
tion that everything human perishes except 
actions and the consequences that ensue. 
To orthodox India its tenets were as heret- 
ical as those of Christianity were to the 
Jews. Nonetheless the doctrine became 
popular. But doctrines once popularized 
lose their nobility. The degeneracy of 
Buddhism is due to Cathay. 

To the Hindu life was an incident be- 
tween two eternities, an episode in the 
string of deaths and rebirths. To Mon- 
goHans it was a unique experience. They 
had no knowledge of the supersensible, 
[37] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

no suspicion of the ideal. Among them 
Buddhism operated a conversion. It 
stimulated a thirst for the divine. 

The thirst is unquenchable. Buddhism, 
in its simple severity, could not even 
attempt to slake it. But on its simplicity 
a priesthood shook parures. Its severity 
was cloaked with mantles of gold. The 
founder, an atheist who had denied the 
gods, was transformed into one. About 
him a host of divinities was strung. 
The most violently nihilistic of doctrines 
was fanned into an idolatry puerile and 
meek. Nirvana became Elysium, and a 
religion which began as a heresy cul- 
minated in a superstition. That is the 
history of creeds. 



[38] 



II 

ORMUZD 

THE purest of thoughts is that which 
concerns the beginning of things/' 

So Ormuzd instructed Zarathrustra. 

"And what was there at the begin- 
ning?'' the prophet asked. 

" There was Hght and the Kving Word."^ 
Long later the statement was repeated in 
the Gospel attributed to John. Origi- 
nally it occurred in the course of a con- 
versation that the Avesta reports. In a 
similar manner Exodus provides a revela- 
tion which Moses received. There Je- 
hovah said: ^ehyeh ^asher 'ehyeh. In 
the Avesta Ormuzd said: ahmi yad 

^ Avesta (Anquetil-Duperron), i. 393. 
[39] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

ahmi} Word for word the declarations 
are identical. Each means I am that I 
am.^ 

The conformity of the pronouncements 
may be fortuitous. Their relative priority 
uncertain chronology obscures. The date 
that orthodoxy has assigned to Moses is 
about 1500 B.C. Plutarch said that Zara- 
thrustra lived five thousand years before 
the fall of Troy. Both dates are per- 
haps questionable. But a possible hy- 
pothesis philology provides. The term 
Jehovah is a seventeenth -century expan- 
sion of the Hebrew T\^TV^ or Jhvh, now 
usually written Jahveh and commonly 
translated: He who causes to he. The 
original rendering of Ormuzd is Ahura- 
mazda. Ahura means living and mazdao 
creator. The period when Exodus was 

* Avesta, Hormazd Yasht. 

* Exodus iii. 14. 

[40] 



ORMUZD 

written is probably post-exilic. The period 
when the Avesta was completed is as- 
sumed to be pre-Cyrian. It was at the 
junction of the two epochs that Iran and 
Israel met. 

But, however the pronouncements may 
conform, however also they may confuse, 
the one reported in Exodus is alone exact. 
In subsequent metamorphoses the name 
might fade, the deity remained. Where- 
as, save to diminishing Parsis, Ormuzd, 
once omnipotent throughout the Persian 
sky, has gone. A time, though, there was, 
when from his throne in the ideal he 
menaced the apathy of Brahm, the maj- 
esty of Zeus, when even from the death 
of deaths he might have ejected Buddha 
and, supreme in the Orient, ruled also in 
the West. Salamis prevented that. But 
one may wonder whether the conquest 
had not already been effected, whether 
[41] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

for that matter the results are not appar- 
ent still. Brahma, Ormuzd, Zeus, Ju- 
piter, are but different conceptions of a 
primal idea. They are four great gods 
diversely represented yet originally iden- 
tical, and whose attributes Jahveh, in his 
ascensions, perhaps absorbed. 

Ormuzd represented purity and light. 
For his worship no temple was necessary, 
barely a shrine, never an image. In his 
celestial court were parikas, the glittering 
bayaderes of love that a later faith called 
peris, but his sole consorts were Prayers. 
About him and them gathered amshas- 
pands and izeds, angels and seraphs, the 
winged host of loveliness that in Baby- 
lon enthralled the Jews who returned 
from captivity escorted by them. The 
allurement of their charm, enchanting 
then, enchants the world to-day. There 
has been little that is more poetic, except 
[42] 



ORMUZD 

perhaps Ormuzd himself, who symbolized 
whatever is blinding in beauty, particularly 
the sun's effulgence, the radiance of light. 

The light endures, though the god has 
gone. Yet at the time, aloof in clear 
ether and aloft, he resplended in a sover- 
eignty that only Ahriman disputed. 

Ahriman has been more steadfast than 
Ormuzd. He too captivated the captive 
Hebrews. The latter adopted him and 
called him Satan, as they also adopted 
one of his minor legates, Ashmodai — 
transformed by the Vulgate into Asmo- 
deus — a little jealous devil who, in the 
apocryphal Tobit, strangled husbands on 
their bridal nights. Ahriman, his master, 
represented everything that was the oppo- 
site of Ormuzd. Ahriman dwelt in dark- 
ness, Ormuzd in light. Ormuzd was 
primate of purity; Ahriman, prince of 
whatever is base. One had angels and 
[43] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

archangels for aids, the other fiends and 
demons. Between their forces war was 
constant. Each strove for the soul of 
man. But after death, when, in the bal- 
ance, the deeds of the defunct were 
weighed, there appeared a golden-eyed 
redeemer, Mithra, who so closely re- 
sembled the Christ that the world hesi- 
tated, for a moment, between them. 

It was because of these conceptions 
that Persia dreamed of conquering the 
West. At Marathon and at Salamis that 
illusion was looted. History tells of the 
cohorts that descended there. It relates 
further what they did. But of what they 
thought there is no record. It was, per- 
haps, too obvious. Ormuzd, god of light 
and, in the Orient, god of the day, was, 
in the darker and duller Occident, men- 
aced there also by Ahriman. Politically 
the expedition is not very explicable. 
[ 44 ] 



ORMUZD 

Considered from a religous standpoint the 
motive is clear. But though the Persian 
forces could not uphold their light in 
Greece, higher forces projected it far be- 
yond, to the remote north, to a south 
that was still remoter. 

Originally the light was Vedic. It was 
identical with that of Agni, of Indra and 
of Varuna. But while these, without 
subsidence, passed, absorbed by Brahm, 
the light of Iran, deiflecting, persisted, 
and so potently that it lit the Teutonic 
sky, glows still in Christendom, after 
refracting perhaps in Inca temples. Its 
revelation is due to Zarathrustra. 

Zarathrustra, commonly written Zoro- 
aster, is a name translatable into "star 
of gold '' and also into " keeper of old 
camels/' Probably it was first employed 
to designate an imaginary prophet, and 
then a series of spiritual though actual 
[45] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

successors bv whom, in the course of cen- 
turies, the Avesta was evolved. Otherwise 
Zarathrustra and Gotama are brothers 
in Brahmanaspati. Both had virgin 
mothers. In the lives of both mira- 
cles are common. The advent of Zara- 
thrustra was accounted the ruin of 
demons. ^^Tien he was born he laughed 
aloud. As a child he slept in flames. 
As a man he walked on water. Before 
prodigies such as these fiends fell like 
autumn leaves. Hence, on the part of 
the devil, an attempt to seduce him from 
the divine. Mairya, the demon of death, 
offered him, as Mara offered Gotama, 
as Satan offered Jesus, the empire of the 
earth. Zarathrustra rebuked the devil 
first with stones, then with pious w^ords. 
From him, as from the Buddha and the 
Christ, abashed the tempter retreated.^ 
^ Darmestetter: Onnazd et Ahriman. 
[46] 



ORMUZD 

That victory over evil, the Parsis to- 
day regard as the capital event in the 
history of the world. It was the imme- 
diate prelude to the revelation of the Law 
which Ormuzd vouchsafed to his prophet. 

The revelation occurred on a moun- 
tain, in the course of conversations, dur- 
ing which Zarathrustra questioned and 
Ormuzd, in the voice of heaven, replied. 
So was the Law proclaimed in India. 
There Mitra and Varuna sang it through 
the sky.^ The expression is notable, for 
the song of the sky is thunder and the 
theophany that of Sinai. There is an- 
other rapprochement in Babylonian lore 
and a third in the Eddas, where it is re- 
lated that to Sigurd the secret of the 
runes was sung. 

Meanwhile, the revelation completed 
and proclaimed, Zarathrustra died as 

^ Rig-Veda, i. 151. 
[47] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

miraculously as he was born, foretelling, 
as he went, the coming of a messiah, his 
own son, Coshyos — the delayed fruit of 
an immaculate hymen that is not to be 
fecund until the end of time — but who, 
at the consummation of the ages, will 
rejuvenate the world, affranchise it from 
death, vanquish Ahriman, terminate the 
struggle between good and evil, purify 
hell and fill it full with glory. Then the 
dead shall rise and immortality be uni- 
versal.^ 

Zoroaster is obviously mythical. The 
Buddha is also. But precisely as the 
Buddhist scriptures exist, so also do the 
Zoroastrian. They do more. Frequently 
they enlighten, occasionally they exalt. 
Written in gold on perfumed leather, 
the original edition, limited to two copies, 
was so sacred that it was sullied if seen. 

^ Zamyad Yasht. xix. 89 sq, 
[48] 



ORMUZD 

Burned with the palace of Persepolis — 
which Alexander, the Great Sinner, in a 
drunken orgy, destroyed — only frag- 
ments of the fargards remain. These 
tell of creation, effected in six epochs, and 
of a pairi-daeza. 

Delitzsch voluminously asked: Wo lag 
das Paradies? There it is. There is 
the primal paradise. In it Ormuzd put 
Mashya, the first man, and Mashyana, 
the first woman, whom Ahriman, in the 
form of a serpent, seduced. Thereafter 
ensued the struggle in which all have or 
will participate, one that, extending be- 
yond the limits of the visible world, 
arrays seasons and spirits and the senses 
of man in a conflict of good and evil that 
can end only when, from the depths of 
the dawn, radiant in the Vermillion sky, 
Coshyos, hero of the resurrection, trium- 
phantly appears, 

[49] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

The parallel between this romance and 
subsequent poetry is curious. In Chal- 
dea, before the fargards were, the story 
of Creation, of Eden, and of the fall had 
been told. In Egypt, before the Avesta 
was written, the resurrection and the 
life were known. Similar legends and 
prospects may or may not represent an 
autonomous development of Iranian 
thought. The successors of the problem- 
atic Zarathrustra, the line of magi who 
wrote and taught in his name, may have 
gathered the tales and theories elsewhere. 
In the creed which they instituted there 
is a trinity. India had one, Egypt an- 
other. Babylonia a third. Babylonia had 
even three of them. But in Mithra, Iran 
had a redeemer that no other creed 
possessed. In Coshyos was a saviour, 
virgin born, who nowhere else was imag- 
ined. In Mara, Buddhism had a Satan. 
[50] 



ORMUZD 

The Persian Ahriman is Satan himself. 
Babylon had angels and cherubs. In 
Iran there were guardian angels, there 
were archangels with flaming swords, 
there were fairies, there were goblins, the 
celestial, the poetic, the demoniac com- 
bined. Zoroasterism may or may not 
have had a past, it is perhaps evident 
that it had a future. 

An inscription chiselled in the red 
granite of Ekbatana describes Ormuzd 
as creator of heaven and earth. In the 
Veda the description of Indra is identical.^ 
It was applied equally to Jahveh in Judea. 
But above Jahveh, Kabbalists discerned 
En Soph. Above Indra metaphysicians 
discovered Brahma. Similarly the Per- 
sian magi found that Ormuzd, however 
perfect, was not perfect enough and, from 
the depths of the ideal, they disclosed 

* R. V. X. 3. "Indra created heaven and earth." 
[51] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

Zervan Akerene, the Eternal, from whom 
all things come and to whom all return. 

That conception is not reached in the 
Avesta. It is in the Bundahish, a work 
which, while much later, is based on 
earlier traditions, memories it may be, 
of antediluvian legends brought from the 
summits of upper Asia by Djemschid, 
the fabulous Abraham of the Persians of 
whom Zarathrustra was the Moses. But 
in default of the Eternal, the Avesta con- 
tains pictures of enduring charm 

Among these is a highly poetic pastel 
that displays the soul of man surprised 
in the first post-mortem ambuscades. 
There a figure, beautiful or revolting, 
cries at him: "I am thyself, the image of 
thine earthly life.'' 

If that life has been beautiful, the soul 
of man, led by itself, is conducted to 
heaven. Otherwise, led still by itself, it 
[52] 



ORMUZD 

descended to Drujo-demana, the House 
of Destruction, where, fed on insults and 
offal, it waited till its sins were destroyed. 
The waiting might be long. It was not 
everlasting. There was Mithra to inter- 
cede. Besides, evil was regarded but as 
a shadow on the surface of things. In 
the seventh epoch of creation, a period 
yet to be, the age which Coshyos is to 
usher, the shadow will fade. The wicked, 
purified of their wickedness, will be re- 
ceived among the blessed. Even Ahri- 
man is to be converted. In that definite 
triumph of light over darkness is the 
resurrection and the life, life in Garo- 
demana, literally House of Hymns, a pre- 
Christian heaven, yet strictly Christian, 
where, to the trumpetings of angels, 
hosannahs are ceaselessly sung.^ 

John — or, more exactly, his homonym 

* Yasht. xxviii. 10, xxxiv. 2. 
[53] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

— was perhaps acquainted with that 
idea, as he may have been with other 
theories that the Avesta contains. But 
the possibiUty is a detail. It is the idea 
that counts. Behind it is the unique 
character of this doctrine which, in ehmi- 
nating evil, converted even Satan. 

Satan seldom gets his due. He was 
the first artist and has remained the 
greatest. In creating evil he fashioned 
what is a luxury and a necessity combined. 
Evil is the counterpart of excellence. 
Both have their roots in nature. One 
could not be destroyed without the other. 
For every form of evil there is a cor- 
responding form of good. Virtue would 
be meaningless were it not for vice. 
Honour would have no nobility were it 
not for shame. If ever evil be banished 
from the scheme of things, life could 
have no savour and joy no delight. 
[54] 



ORMUZD 

Happiness and unhappiness would be 
synonymous terms. 

It is for this reason that scoffers have 
mocked at heaven. Heaven may be very 
different from what has been fancied. 
But the theory of it, however unphilo- 
sophic, which Zoroasterism suppUed, 
carried with it a creed not of tears but of 
smiles, a religion of lofty tolerance, one in 
which the demonology barely alarmed, 
for redemption was assured, and so fully 
that on earth melancholy was accounted 
a folly. 

Though tolerant, it could be austere. 
Meanness, thanklessness, loquaciousness, 
jealousy, an unbecoming attire, evil 
thoughts, whatever is sensual, whatever 
is coarse, any promenade in mud actual 
or metaphorical, severely it condemned. 
Particularly was avarice censured. "There 
are many who do not hke to give," Ormuzd, 

[55] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

in the Vendidad^ confided to Zarathrustra. 
The high god added: ''Ahriman awaits 
them.'' 

Ahriman awaited also the harlot who, 
elsewhere, at that period, was holy. Yet 
in lapses, confession and repentance suf- 
ficed for remission, provided that in pray- 
ing for forgiveness the sinner forgave 
those that had sinned against him. If he 
lacked the time, were he dying, a priest 
might yet save him with words whispered 
in the ear. That was the extreme unc- 
tion, hardly administrable, however, in 
case of wilful omission of the darun^ which 
was communion. 

This sacrament, the most mystic of the 
Church, was observed by the Incas, who 
also confessed, also atoned, who, like the 
Buddhists, were baptized, but who, like 
the Persians, worshipped the sun and, 
with perhaps a finer instinct of what the 
[56] 



ORMUZD 

beautiful truly is, worshipped too the 
rainbow.^ 

Huraken, the winged and feathered 
serpent-god of the Toltecs, was adored 
in temples that upheld a cross. The 
Incas lacked that symbol. But they 
had a Satan. They had also the ex- 
pectation of a saviour, belief in whom 
could alone have consoled for the ad- 
vent of Pizarro. Over what highways 
of sea or sky, the living Word, which 
Ormuzd spoke, reached them, there 
has been no somnambulist of history to 
divine. But in the splendour that Cuzco 
was, in the golden temples of the town of 
gold, along the scarlet lanes where sacred 
peacocks strolled and girls more sacred 
still — vestals whom Pizarro 's soldiers 
raped — in that City of the Sun, the Word 
re-echoed. The mystery of it, reported 

^ Garcilasso : Commentarios reales. 
[57] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

back to the Holy OflBce, was declared an 
artifice of the devil. 

Less mysteriously, through the obvious 
vehicle of cognate speech, it reached the 
Norse, stirred the scalds, who repeated 
it in the Eddie sagas. Loki and his in- 
inferior fiends are, as there represented, 
quite as black as Ahriman and his cohorts. 
The conflict of good and evil is almost as 
fully dire. But Odin is a colourless re- 
flection of Ormuzd. The sesir, the angels 
of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than 
the izeds. The figure of Baldr, the re- 
deemer, faints beside that of Mithra. 
Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing 
than Garo-demana, was more trite in 
its wassails than the latter in its hymns. 

What these abstractions lacked was 

not the Logos but the light. However 

brilliantly the Iranian sun might glow, 

in the sullen north its rays were lost. The 

[58] 



ORMUZD 

mists, obscuring it, made Valhalla dim 
and set the gods in twilight. It stirred 
the scalds to runes but not to inspiration. 
There is none in the Eddas. Nor was 
there any in the Nibelungen, until the 
light, almost extinct, burst suddenly in 
the flaming scores of Wagner. 

Transformed by ages and by man, yet 
lifted at last from their secular slumber, 
the Persian myths achieved there their 
Occidental apotheosis, and, it may be, on 
steps of song, mounted to the ideal where 
Zervan Akerene muses. 



[59] 



I 



III 

AMON-RA 

AM all that is, has been and shall be. 
No mortal has lifted my veil." 
That pronouncement, graven on the 
statue of Isis, confounded Egypt, con- 
demning her mysteriously for some sin, 
anterior and unknown, to ignorance of 
the divine, leaving her, in default of reve- 
lation, to worship what she would, jackals, 
hyenas, cats, hawks, the ibis; beasts and 
birds. Yet to the people, whose minds 
were as naked as their bodies, and who, 
in addition, were slaves, there must have 
been something very superior in the lords 
of the desert and the air. Obviously 
they were wise. Among them were some 

[60] 



AMON-RA 

that knew in advance the change of the 
seasons. Others, indifferent to man and 
independent of him, migrated over high- 
ways known but to them. The senses of 
all were keyed to vibrations. They heard 
the inaudible, saw the invisible, and, 
though they had a language of their own, 
when questioned never replied. To slaves, 
clearly they were gods. 

Not to the priests, however. They 
knew better. They but affected belief 
in divinities that had perhaps emigrated 
from the enigmas of geography and who 
were polychrome as the skies they had 
crossed. Fashioned in stone, these gods 
were dog-headed or longly beaked. Some, 
though, were alive. In temples were 
saurians on purple carpets, bulls draped 
with spangled shawls, hawks on shimmer- 
ing perches, that little gold chains de- 
tained. Among gods of this character, 
[61] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

the Sphinx, in its role of eternal spectre, 
must have seemed the ideal. Others 
were nearly sublime. Particularly there 
was Ausar. 

Ausar, called commonly Osiris, died for 
man. In an attempt to preserve har- 
mony, in a struggle with the real spirit 
of actual evil which discord is, Osiris was 
slain. Being a god he arose from the 
dead. The latter thereafter he judged. 

The people knew little, if anything, 
concerning him. They knew little if 
anything at all. They had a menagerie 
and a full consciousness of their own in- 
significance. That suflSced. In all of 
carnal Africa, the priest alone possessed 
what then was truth and of which a part 
is theology now. 

Egypt, in which the evangels began, 
millennia before they were written, knew 
no genesis. Her history, sculptured in 
[62] 



AMON-RA 

hieroglyphics, was cut on pages of stone. 
It awoke in the falling of cataracts. It 
ended with simoons in sand. The books 
that tell of it are pyramids, obelisks, 
necropoles; constructions colossal and 
enigmatic; the granite epitaphs of finite 
things. To-day, in the shattered temples, 
from which all other gods are gone, one 
divinity still lingers. It is Silence. 

In Iran sorrow was a folly. In Egypt 
speech was a sin. Apis could bellow, 
Anubis bark; man might not even stutter. 
It was in the submission of dumb obedi- 
ence that the palpable eternities of the 
pyramids were piled. Yet in that dark- 
ness was light, in silence was the Word. 
But to behold and to hear was possible 
only in sanctuaries reserved to the elect. 
The gods too had their castes. The 
lowest only were fellahin fit to worship. 
On the lips of the others the priests held 
[63] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

always a finger. Crocodiles were less 
distant, hyenas more approachable, and 
the Egyptian, barred from the divine, 
found it on earth. He prayed to scor- 
pions, sang hymns to scarabs, coaxed the 
jackal with psalms; with dances he pla- 
cated the ibis. It w^as ridiculous but 
human. He too would have a part, 
however insensate, in the dreams of all 
mankind. 

Yet, had he looked not down but up, 
he would have lifted at least a fringe of 
the Isian veil. The sun, taken as a sym- 
bol only, the symbol of life, death, and 
resurrection — phases which its rising, 
setting, and return suggest — was the 
deity, the one really existing god. Nomi- 
inally, figuratively, even concretely, there 
were others; a whole host, a hierarchy 
vaster than the Aryans knew; a great 
crowd of divinities less grandiose than 
[64] 



AMON-RA 

gaudy, that swarmed in space, strolled 
through the dawns and dusk, thronged 
the temples, eyed the quick, confronted 
the dead. They were but appearances, 
mere masks, expressions, hypostases, 
eidolons of Ra. 

Ra was the celestial pharaoh. But not 
originally. Originally he was part of a 
triad which itself was part of a triple 
trinity. Ra then was but one divinity 
among many gods. These ultimately lost 
themselves in him so indistinguishably 
that there are litanies in which the names 
of seventy-five of them are used in address- 
ing him. Regarded as the unbegotten be- 
getter of the first beginning, he succeeded 
in achieving the incomprehensible. He 
became triune and remained unique. He 
was Osiris, he was Isis, he was Horus. 
At once father, mother, and son, he fecun- 
dated, conceived, produced, and was. 
[65] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

From him gods and goddesses ema- 
nated in siderial fireworks that illuminated 
the heavens, dazzled the earth, then 
melted into each other, faded away or, 
occasionally, flared afresh in a glare dis- 
pelling and persistent. Among these 
latter was Amon. Glimmering primarily 
in provincial obscurity at Thebes, the 
thin fire of his shrine mounted spirally 
to Ra, fused its flames with his, expand- 
ing and uniting so inseparably with them, 
that the two became one. Amon means 
hidden; Amon-Ra, the hidden light. 

In the infinite, time is not. In heaven 
there is no chronology. The date of any 
god's accession to supremacy there is, 
consequently, apart from mortal ken. 
None the less that of Amon-Ra is known. 
At the beginning of the earthly reign of 
Amonhoteph III., an edict, scrupulously 
executed throughout Egypt, determined, 
[66] 



AMON-RA 

on monument and wall, the substitution of 
Amon-Ra's name for that of previously 
superior gods. 

The pharaohnate of Amonhoteph be- 
gan about 1500 B.C. It is from that 
period, therefore, that dates the divinity's 
accession to the pharaohnate of the skies. 
There is, or should be, a reason for all 
things. There is one for that. Amon- 
hoteph regarded himself as Amon's son. 
It was one of the traits of the pharaohs, 
as it was also of the Incas, to believe, or 
at least to assert, that their fathers, there- 
fore themselves, were divine. As a con- 
sequence of the idea they prayed to their 
own images and likened their palaces to 
inns. 

Originally foreigners, invaders from 
Akkad or Sumer, the pharaohs first con- 
quered, then surprised. It was they that 
embanked the Nile, turned morasses into 
[67] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

meadows and piled the pyramids. More 
exactly^ it was by their commands that 
these miracles were contrived. To the 
neolithic people whom they subjugated 
their divinity was clear. So elsewhere 
was that of the kings of Akkad. Like 
them, like the Incas, the pharaohs were 
of the solar race and so remained from 
the first dynasty to the Greek conquest, 
when Alexander, to legitimatize his sover- 
eignty, had himself acknowledged as 
Amon's son. 

The ceremony had its precedents. An 
inscription in eulogy of the great Rameses 
states that Amon, when possessing the 
pharaohs august mother, engendered him 
as a god. On a wall of the Temple of 
Luxor an earlier inscription sets forth 
that the god of Thebes, incarnating him- 
self in the person of Thotmes IV., ap- 
peared in his divine form to the pharaoh's 
[68] 



AMON-RA 

queen, who, at sight of his beauty, con- 
ceived. 

It was therefore not in the beast alone, 
but in man, that divinity revealed itself 
in Egpyt. That in Judea a similar reve- 
lation should have been withheld until 
after the Roman occupation is hardly 
explicable on the theory, general among 
scholars, that Moses is not a historical 
character, for an identical revelation had 
been received in Babylonia where Israel 
twice loitered. Moreover, a curious paral- 
lelism exists between post-Mosaic prophecy 
and Egyptian clairvoyance. In a papy- 
rus of the Thotmes III. epoch — about 
1600 B.C. — it is written: "The people 
of the age of the son of man shall rejoice 
and establish his name forever. They 
shall be removed from evil and the 
wricked shall humble their mouths." In 
commenting the passage an Egyptologist 
[69] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

noted that the words son of man are a 
literal translation of the original si-n-sa} 
But already in Akkad a similar prophecy 
had been uttered.^ It may be, therefore, 
that it was in Babylon that Israel first 
heard it. 

The doctrine of a trinity, common 
to almost all antique beliefs, was a 
blasphemy to the Jews. The belief in im- 
mortality, also prevalent, though less gen- 
eral, was to them an abomination. The 
miracle of divine descent they were per- 
haps too practical to accept. There was 
no room in their creed for the dogma of 
future rewards and punishments, and that, 
together with other articles of the Chris- 
tian faith, Egypt's elect professed. 

The slaves and mongrels that consti- 
tuted the bulk of the population were not 

* Sayce: Guifford Lectures. 
^ Jastrow: The Dibbara Epic. 

[70] 



AMON-RA 

instructed in these things and would not 
have understood them if they had been. 
In Babylonia education was compulsory. 
In Egypt it was an art, a gift, mysterious 
in itself, reserved to the few. To the 
Egyptian, religion consisted in paraded 
symbols, in avenues of sphinxes, in forests 
of obelisks, in pharaohs seated colossally 
before the temple doors, in inscriptions that 
told indistinguishably of theomorphic men 
and anthropomorphic gods, and in a belief 
in the divinity of bulls and hawks. 

These latter had their uses. In trans- 
formations elsewhere effected, the sacred 
bull may have become a golden calf, the 
golden hawk a sacred dove. In Egypt 
they were otherwise serviceable. The 
worship of them, of other birds and beasts, 
of insects and vipers as well, ecclesiasti- 
cally indorsed, hid the myth of metemp- 
sychosis. 

[71] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

Of that the people knew nothing. 
When they died they ceased to be. Even 
mummification, usually supposed to have 
been general, was not for them. Down 
to an epoch relatively late it was a privi- 
lege reserved to priests and princes. 
When the commonalty were embalmed 
it was with the opulent design that, in a 
future existence, they should serve their 
masters as they had in this. Embalming 
was a preparation for the Judgment Day. 
Of that the people knew nothing either. 
It was even unlawful that concerning it 
they should be apprised. 

In the Louvre is a statue of Ptah-meh, 
high priest of Memphis. On it are the 
significant words: *' Nothing was hidden 
from him.'' A passage of Zosimus states 
that what was hidden it was illicit to re- 
veal, except, Jamblicus explained, to 
those whose discretion a long novitiate 
[72] 



AMON-RA 

had assured. To such only was dis- 
closed the secret that life is death in a 
land of darkness, and death is life in a 
land of light. 

It was because of this that the pharaohs 
seated themselves colossally before the 
temple doors. It was because of it that 
their palaces were inns and their tombs 
were homes. It was because of it that 
their sepulchres were built for eternity 
and the tenements of their souls placed 
there embalmed. It was because of this 
that the triumphs of men were inscribed 
in the halls of the gods. Instead of seek- 
ing to be absorbed, it was their own in- 
extinguishable individuality that they 
endeavoured to assert. Tombs, tenements, 
triumphs, these all were preparations for 
the Land of Light. 

The land was Alu, the asphodel mead- 
ows of the celestial Nile that wound 
[73] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

through the Milky Way. To reach it a 
passport, vise'd by Osiris, suflSced. The 
first draft of that passport was held to 
have been written on tablets of alabaster, 
in letters of lapis lazuli, by an eidolon of 
Ra, who, known in Egypt as Thoth, else- 
where was Hermes Thrice the Greatest. 

At Memphis, Hermes was regarded as 
representing the personification of divine 
wisdom, or, more exactly perhaps, the 
inventive power of the human mind. A 
little library of forty-two books — which 
a patricist saw, but not being initiate 
could not read — was attributed to him.^ 
The books contained the entire hieratic 
belief. Fragments that are held to have 
survived in an extant Greek novel are 
obviously Egyptian, but as obviously 
Alexandrine and neo-platonic. In the 
editio prince ps Pheidias is mentioned. 

^ Clemens Alexandrines: Stromata vi. 
[74] 



AMON-RA 

Mention of Michel Angelo would have 
been less anachronistic. The original 
books are gone, all of them, forever, per- 
haps, save one, chapters of which are as 
old as the fourth dynasty and, it may be, 
are still older. Pyramid texts of the 
fifth dynasty show that there then existed 
what to-day is termed The Book of the 
Bead, a copy of which, put in a mummy's 
arms, was a talisman for the soul in the 
Court of Amenti, a passport thence to 
the Land of Light. 

"There is no book like it, man hath 
not spoken it, earth hath not heard it" — 
very truthfully it recites of itself. One 
copy, known as the Louvre Papyrus, 
presents the Divine Comedy, as primarily 
conceived and illustrated by an archaic 
Dore. Text and vignettes display the 
tribunal where the souls of the dead are 
judged. 

[751 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

In the foreground is an altar. Adja- 
cent is a figure, half griffon, half chimera, 
the Beast of Amenti, perhaps too of the 
Apocalypse. Beyond, an ape poises a 
pair of scales. For balance is an ostrich 
feather. Above are the spirits of fate. 
At the left Osiris is enthroned. From a 
balcony his assessors lean. At the right 
is the entrance. There the disembodied, 
ushered by Truth, appears and, in hom- 
ages and genuflections, affirms negatively 
the decalogue; protesting before the 
Master of Eternity that there is no evil 
in him; praying the dwellers in Amenti 
that he may cross the dark way; declar- 
ing to each that he has not committed 
the particular sin over which they preside. 

''O Eater of Spirits gone out of the 

windows of Alu! O Master of the 

Faces!" he variously calls. "O the One 

who associates the Splendours! O the 

[76] 



AMON-RA 

Glowing Feet gone out of the Night! I 
did not lie. I did not kill. I have not 
been anxious. I did not talk abundantly. 
I made no one weep. No heart have 1 
harmed.'' 

The assessors listen. "I have not been 
anxious. I made no one weep. No heart 
have I harmed.'' These abstentions, 
graces now, were virtues then, and so 
efficacious that they perhaps sufficed, as 
rightly they should, for absolution. 

But while the assessors listen and 
Osiris looks gravely on, no one accuses. 
It is conscience in its nakedness, con- 
science exposed there where all may see 
it, where for the first time perhaps it truly 
sees itself, and seeing realizes what there 
is in it of evil and what of good, it is that 
which protests. 

Still the assessors listen. Orthodoxy 
on the part of the respondent is to them 
[77] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAXD 

a minor thing. TMiat they require is 
that he shall have been merciful to his 
fellow creatures, true to himself. Only 
when it is proven that he has done his 
duty to man, is he permitted to show that 
he has done his duty to gods. 

The appeal continues: "I fed the hun- 
gry, clothed the naked, I gave water to 
them that thirsted. O ye that dwell in 
Amenti! I am unpolluted, I am pure." 

But is it true.^ The scales decide. 
The heart of the respondent is weighed. 
If heavy, out it is cast to pass with him 
again through life's infernal circles. But, 
if Hght as the feather in the balance and 
therefore equal with truth, it is restored 
to the body, which then resurrects and, 
in the bark of the Sun, sails the celestial 
Nile to Ra and the Land of Light. 

That singer gone out of Amenti, actu- 
allv, like Osiris, rose from the dead. The 
[78] 



AMON-RA 

picture which a papyrus forty centuries 
old presents, is the dream of a vision that 
Michel Angelo displayed, a sketch for a 
papal fresco. Such indeed was the con- 
formity between the underlying concep- 
tions, that, at almost the first monition, 
Isis, whose veil no mortal had raised, 
lifted it from her black breast and suckled 
there the infant Jesus. Then, presently, 
in temples that had teemed, the silence 
of the desert brooded. The tide of life 
retreated, an entire theogony vanished, 
exorcised, both of them, by the sign of 
the cross. 

At sight of the unimagined emblem, a 
priesthood who in secret sanctuaries had 
evolved nearly all but that, flung them- 
selves into crypts beneath, pulled the 
walls down after them, burying unem- 
balmed the arcana of a creed whose 
spirit still is immortal. 
[79] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

In Egypt, then, only tombs and ne- 
cropoles survived. But it is legendary 
that, in the solitudes of the Thebaid, 
dispossessed eidolons of Ra, appearing in 
the shape of chimeras, terrified ancho- 
rites, to whom, with vengeful eyes, they 
indicated their ruined altars. 



[80] 



IV 

BEL-MARDUK 

THE inscriptions of Assyrian kings 
have, many of them, the monotony 
of hell. Made of boasts and shrieks, 
they recite the capture and sack of cities ; 
the torrents of blood with which, like 
wool, the streets were dyed; the flaming 
pyramids of prisoners; the groans of men 
impaled; the cries of ravished women. 

The inscriptions are not all infernal. 
Those that relate to Assurbanipal — vul- 
garly, Sandanapallos, — are even ornate. 
But Assurbanipal, while probably fiend- 
ish and certainly crapulous, was clearly 
literary besides. From the spoil of sacked 
cities this bibliofilou took libraries, the 
[81] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

myths and epics of creation, sacred texts 
from Eridu and Ur, volumes in the ex- 
tinct tongues of Akkad and Sumer, first 
editions of the Book of God. 

These, re-edited in cuneiform and kept 
conveniently on the second floor of his 
palace, fell with Nineveh, where, until 
recently recovered, for millennia they 
lay. Additionally, from shelves set up 
in the days of Khammurabi — the Am- 
raphel of Genesis — Nippur has yielded 
ghostly tablets and Borsippa treasuries of 
Babylonian ken. 

These, the eldest revelations of the 
divine, are the last that man has deci- 
phered. The altars and people that 
heard them first, the marble temples, the 
ivory palaces, the murderous throngs, 
are dust. The entire civilization from 
which they came has vanished. Yet, 
traced with a wooden reed on squares of 
[82] 



BEL-MARDUK 

clay, are flights of little arrows, from 
which, magically, it all returns. Miracu- 
lously with these books a world revives. 
Fashioned, some of them, at an epoch 
that in biblical chronology is anterior to 
man, they tell of creation, of the serpent, 
the fall and the deluge. At the gates 
of paradise you see man dying, poisoned 
by the tree of life. Before Genesis was, 
already it had been written. 

In the Chaldean Book of the Beginnings 
creation was effected in successive acts. 
According to the epic of it, humanity's 
primal home was a paradise where ten 
impressive persons — the models, it maybe, 
of antediluvian patriarchs — reigned in- 
terminably, agreeably also, finally sin- 
fully as well. In punishment a deluge 
swept them away. From the flood there 
escaped one man who separated a mythi- 
cal from an heroic age. In the latter 
[83] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

epoch, beings descended from demons 
built Nineveh and Babylon; organized 
human existence; invented arithmetic, 
geometry, astronomy and the calendar; 
counted the planets; numbered the days 
of the year, divided them into months and 
weeks; established the Sabbath; decorated 
the skies with the signs of the zodiac, in- 
stituting, in the interim, colleges of sa- 
vants and priests. These speculated on 
the origin of things, attributed it to spon- 
taneous generation, the descent of man 
to evolution, entertaining the vulgar mean- 
while with tales of gods and ghosts.^ 

The cosmological texts now available 
were not written then. They are drawn 
from others that were. But there is a 
vignette that probably is of that age. It 
represents a man and a woman stretching 

* Lenormant: Les Origines. Schrader: Die Keilen- 
schriften. Smith: Chaldean Genesis. 

[84] 



BEL-MARDUK 

their hands to a tree. Behind the woman 
writhes a snake. The tree, known as the 
holy cedar of Eridu, the fruit of which 
stimulated desire, is described in an epic 
that recites the adventures of Gilgames. 

Gilgames was the national hero of 
Chaldea. The story of his loves with 
Ishtar is repeated in the Samson and 
Delilah myth. Ishtar, described in an 
Assyrian inscription as Our Lady of 
Girdles, was the original Venus, as Gil- 
games was perhaps the prototype of 
Hercules. The legend of his labours is 
represented on a seal of Sargon of 
Akkad, a king who ruled fifty-seven hun- 
dred years ago. 

In the epic, Gilgames, betrayed by 
Ishtar, tried to find out how not to die. 
In trying he reached a garden, guarded by* 
cherubim, where the holy cedar was. 
There he learned that one being only could 
[85] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

teach him to be immortal, and that being, 
Adra-Khasis, had been translated to the 
Land of the Silver Sky. Adra-Khasis, was 
the Chaldean Noah. Gilgames sought 
him and the story of the deluge follows. 
But with a difference. On the seventh 
day, Adra-Khasis released from his ark a 
dove that returned, finally a raven that 
did not. Then he looked out, and look- 
ing, shrieked. Every one had perished. 

Noah was less emotional, or, if equally 
compassionate, the fact is not recited. 
Apart from that detail and one other, the 
story of the flood is common to all folklore. 
Even the Aztecs knew of it. Probably it 
originated in the matrix of nations which 
the table-land of Asia was. But only in 
Chaldean myth, and subsequently in He- 
brew legend, was the flood ascribed to sin. 

Gilgames' quest, meanwhile, could not 
have been wholly vain. In an archaic 
[86] 



BEL-MARDUK 

inscription it is stated that the city of 
Erech was built in olden times by the 
deified Gilgames.^ 

How old the olden times may have 
been is conjectural. Modern science has 
put the advent of man sixty million years 
ago. Chaldean chronology is less spa- 
scious. But its traditions stretched back 
a hundred thousand years. The tra- 
ditions were probably imaginary. Even 
so, in the morning of the world, already 
there were ancient cities. There was 
Nippur, one of whose gods, El Lil, was 
lord of ghosts. There was Eridu, where 
Ea was lord of man. There was Ur, 
where Sin was lord of the moon. There 
were other divinities. There was En- 
mesara, lord of the land whence none re- 
turn, and Makhir, god of dreams. 

There were many more like the latter, 

> Proc. S. B. A. xvi. 13-15. 
[87] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

so many that their sanctuaries made the 
realm a holy land, but one which, ad- 
ministratively, was an aggregate of prin- 
cipalities that Sargon, nearly six thousand 
years ago, combined. Ultimately, from 
sheer age, the empire tottered. It would 
have fallen had not Khammurabi surged. 
What Sargon made, Khammurabi solid- 
ified. Between their colossal figures two 
millennia stretch. These giants are dis- 
tinct. None the less, across the ages they 
seem to fuse, suggestively, not together, 
but into another person. 

Sargon has descended through time 
clothed in a little of the poetry which 
garments nation builders. But the poetry 
is not a mantle for the imaginary. In 
the British Museum is a marble ball that 
he dedicated to a god. Paris has the seal 
of his librarian.^ Copies of his annals 

^ Collection de Clerq. pi. 5, no. 46. 
[88] 



BEL-MARDUK 

are extant.^ In these it is related that, 
when a child, his mother put him in a 
basket of rushes and set him adrift on the 
Euphrates. Presently he was rescued. 
Afterward he became a leader of men. 

Khammurabi was also a leader. He 
was a legislator as well. Sargon united 
principalities, Khammurabi their shrines. 
From one came the nation, from the 
other the god. It is in this way that they 
fuse. To the composite, if it be one, 
history added a heightening touch. 

The Khammurabi legislation came from 
Bel, who, originally, was a local sun-god 
of Nippur. There he was regarded as 
the possessor of the Chaldean Urim and 
Thummin, the tablets of destiny with 
which he cast the fates of men. In the 
mythology of Babylonia these tablets 
were stolen by the god of storms, who 

^ Cuneiform Insc. W. A. iv. 34. 
[89] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

kept them in his thunder fastness. Among 
the forked flames of the lightning there 
they were recovered by Bel, who revealed 
the law to Khammurabi- 

The theophany is perhaps similar to that 
of Sinai. But perhaps, too, it is better 
attested. A diorite block, found at Susa 
in 1902, has the law engraved on it. On 
the summit, a bas-relief displays the god 
disclosing the statutes to the king. 

There are other analogies. Sinai was 
named after Sin, who, though but a 
moon-god, was previously held supreme 
for the reason that, in primitive Baby- 
lonia, the lunar year preceded the solar. 
The sanctuary of the moon-god was Ur, 
of which Abraham was emir. He was 
more, perhaps. Sarratu, from which 
Sarai comes, was the title of the moon- 
goddess. In Genesis^ Sarai is Abra- 
ham's wife. Abraham is a derivative of 
[90] 



BEL-MARDUK 

Aburamu, which was one of the moon's 
many names.^ 

Among these, one in particular has 
since been identified with Jahveh. In 
addition, a clay tablet of the age of Kham- 
murabi, now in the British Museum, has 

on it: 

^ <^ ^»f 

That flight of arrows, being interpreted, 
means: Jave ilu, Jahveh is god.^ 

Other texts show that a title of Bel 
was Masu, a word that letter for letter 
is the same as the Hebrew Mosheh or 
Moses.^ 

It is in this way that Sargon and Kham- 
murabi fuse. Meanwhile the title Masu, 
or hero, was not confined to Bel. It was 
given also to Marduk, the tutelary god 

^ Sayce : Guifford Lectures. 
2 Delitzch: Babel und Bibel. 
' Records of the Past, i. 91. 

[91] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

of Babylon, from whom local mono- 
theism proceeded. 

That monotheism, in appearance rela- 
tively modern, actually was archaic. The 
Chaldean savants knew of but one really 
existing god. To them, all others were 
his emanations. The deus exsuperantis- 
simus was represented by a single stroke 
of the reed, a sign that in its vagueness 
left him formless and incommunicable, 
therefore unworshipable, hence without 
a temple, unless Bab-iH, Babylon, the 
Gate of God, may be so construed. 

The name of the deity, fastidiously con- 
cealed from the vulgar, was, in English, 
One. Not after, or beneath, or above, 
but before him, a trinity swung like a 
screen. From it, for pendant, another 
trinity dangled. From the latter fell a 
third. Below these glories were the cor- 
uscations of an entire nation of inferior 

[92] 



BEL-MARDUK 

gods. The latter, as well as the former, 
all of them, were but the fireworks of 
One. He alone was. The rest, like 
Makhir, were gods of dream. To the 
savants, that is; to the magi and seers. 
To the people the siderial triads and 
planetary divinities throned in the Silver 
Sky augustly real, equally august, and in 
that celestial equality remained, until 
Khammurabi gave precedence to Bel, who 
as Marduk, Bel or Baal Marduk, Lord 
Marduk, became supreme. 

Before Bel, then, the other gods faded 
as the Elohim did before Jahveh, with the 
possible difference that there were more 
to fade — sixty-five thousand, Assurnat- 
sipal, in an inscription, declared. Over 
that army Bel-Marduk acquired the title, 
perhaps significant, of Bel-Kissat, Lord of 
Hosts. Yet it was less as a usurper than 
as an absorber that the ascension was 
[93] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

achieved. Bel but mounted above his 
former peers and from the superior height 
drew their attributes to himself. It was 
sacrilege none the less. As such it alien- 
ated the clergy and enraged the plebs. 
Begun under Khammurabi and com- 
pleted under Nabonidos, it was the reason 
why, during the latter's reign, orthodox 
Babylon received Cyrus not as a foe but 
a friend. 

From the spoliation, meanwhile, no 
nebulousness resulted. Bel was distinctly 
anthropomorphic. His earthly plaisance 
was the Home of the Height, a seven- 
floored mountain of masonry, a rainbow 
pyramid of enamelled brick. At the top 
was a dome. There, in a glittering cham- 
ber, on a dazzling couch, he appeared. 
Elsewhere, in the Vermillion recesses of a 
neighbouring chapel, that winged bulls 
guarded and frescoed monsters adorned, 
[94] 



BEL-MARDUK 

once a year he also appeared, and, above 
the mercy seat, on an alabaster throne, 
sat, or was supposed to sit, contemplating 
the tablets of destiny, determining when 
men should die. 

To the Greeks, the future lay in the lap 
of the gods. To the Babylonians the 
gods alone possessed it, as alone also they 
possessed the present and the past. They 
had all time as all men have their day. 
That day was here and it was brief. 
Death was a descent to Aralu, the land 
whence none return, a region of the 
underworld, called also Shualu, where the 
departed were nourished on dust. Dust 
they were and to dust they returned. 

Extinction was not a punishment or 
even a reward, it was a law. Punishment 
was visited on the transgressor here, as 
here also the piety of the righteous was 
rewarded. When death came, just and 
[95] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

unjust fared alike. The Aryan and 
Egyptian belief in immortality had no 
place in this creed, and consequently it 
had none either in Israel, where Sheol was 
a replica of Shualu. To the Semites of 
Babylonia and Kanaan, the gods alone 
were immortal, and immortal beings would 
be gods. Man could not become divine 
while his deities were still human. 

Exceptionally, exceptional beings such 
as Gilgames and Adra-Khasis might be 
translated to the land of the Silver Sky, 
as Elijah was translated to heaven, but 
otherwise the only mortals that could 
reach it were kings, for a king, in becom- 
ing sovereign, became, ipso facto^ celes- 
tial. As such, ages later, Alexander had 
himself worshipped, and it was in imita- 
tion of his apotheosis that the subsequent 
Caesars declared themselves gods. Yet 
precisely as the latter were man-made 
[96] 



BEL-MARDUK 

deities, so the Babylonian Baalim were 
very similar to human kings. 

For their hunger was cream, oil, dates, 
the flesh of ewe lambs. For their nos- 
trils was the perfume of prayers and of 
psalms; for their passions the virginity 
of girls. Originally the first born of men 
were also given them, but while, with 
higher culture, that sacrifice was abol- 
ished, the sacred harlotry, over which 
Ishtar presided, remained. Judaism 
omitted to incorporate that, but in Kanaan, 
which Babylonia profoundly influenced, 
it was general and, though reviled by 
Israel, was tempting even, and perhaps 
particularly, to Solomon.^ 

The latter 's temple was similar to 
BeFs, from which the Hebraic ritual, 
terms of the Law, the Torah itself, may 
have proceeded, as, it may be, the Sabbath 

^ 1 Kings xi. 5. "Solomon went after Ashtoreth." 
[97] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

did also. On a tablet recovered from 
the library of Assurbanipal it is written: 
"The seventh day is a fast day, a lucky 
day, a sabbatuv" — literally, a day of 
rest for the heart.^ 

In Aralu that day never ceased; the 
dead there, buried, Herodotos said, in 
honey, were unresurrectably dead, dead 
to the earth, dead to the Silver Sky. Yet 
though that was an article of faith, 
through a paradox profoundly poetic, 
there was a belief equally general, in 
ghosts, in hobgoblins, in men with the 
faces of ravens, in others with the bodies 
of scorpions, and in the post-mortem 
persistence of girls that died pure. 

These latter, in searching for someone 
whom they might seduce, must have after- 
ward wandered into the presence of St. 
Anthony. Perhaps, too, it was they who, 

^ Cuneiform Insc. W. A. ii. 32. 
[98] 



BEL-MARDUK 

as succubi, emotionalized the dreams of 
monks. Yet, in view of Ishtar, they 
could not have been very numerous in 
Babylon where, however, they had a 
queen, Lilit, the Lilith of the Talmud, 
Adam's vampire wife, who conceived with 
him shapes of sin. In these also the 
Babylonians believed, and naively they 
represented them in forms so revolting 
that the sight of their own image alarmed 
them away. 

From these shapes or, more exactly, 
from sin itself, it was very properly held 
that all diseases came. Medicine conse- 
quently was a branch of religion. The 
physician was a priest. He asked the 
patient: Have you shed your neigh- 
bour's blood ? Have you approached 
your neighbour's wife ? Have you stolen 
your neighbour's garment ? Or is it that 
you have failed to clothe the naked? 
[99] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

According to the responses he pre- 
scribed.^ 

But the priest who was a physician 
was also a wizard. He peeped and mut- 
tered, or, more subtly, provided enchanted 
philters in which simples had been dis- 
solved. These devices failing, there was 
a series of incantations, the Ritual of 
the Whispered Charm, in which the 
most potent conjuration was the incom- 
municable name. To that all things 
yielded, even the gods.^ But like the 
Shem of the Jews, it was probably never 
wholly uttered, because, save to the magi, 
not wholly known. In the formulae of 
the necromancers it is omitted, though 
in practice it may have been pronounced. 

Even that is doubtful. A knowledge 
of it conferred powers similar to those 

^ IV. R. 50-53. Cf. Delitzch: op. dt. 

^ Lenormant: La Magie chez les Chaldeens. 

[100] 



BEL-MARDUK 

that have been attributed to the Christ, 
and which the Sadducees ascribed to his 
knowledge of the tetragrammation. A 
knowledge of the Babylonian Shem was 
as potent. It served not only men but 
gods. Ishtar, for purposes of her own, 
wanted to get into Aralu. In the re- 
covered epic of her descent, imperiously 
she demanded entrance: 

Porter, open thy door. 

Open thy door that I may enter. 

If thou dost not open thy door, 

I will attack it, I will break down the bars, 

I will cause the dead to rise and devour the living.^ 

Ishtar was admitted. But Aralu was 
the land whence none return. Once in, 
she could not get out until, ultimately, 
the incommunicable name was uttered. 
The epic says that, in the interim, there 
was on earth neither love nor loving. In 
possible connection with which incanta- 

^ Records of the Past. 
[ 101 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

tions have been found, deprecating "the 
consecrated harlots with rebelHous hearts 
that have abandoned the holy places.''^ 

In addition to the Ritual of the Whis- 
pered Charm, there was the Illumination 
of Bel, an encyclopaedia of astrology in 
seventy-two volumes which the suburban 
library of Borsippa contained. During 
the captivity many Jews must have gone 
there. In the large light halls they were 
free to read whatever they liked, religion, 
history, science, the romance of all three. 
The books, catalogued and numbered, 
were ranged on shelves. One had but to 
ask. The service was gratis. 

Babylon, then, prismatic and learned, 
was the most respectable place on earth. 
For ten thousand years man had there 
consulted the stars. But though respect- 
able, it was also equivocal. During a 

* Lenormant; op, cit. 
[ 102 ] 



BEL-MARDUK 

period equally long — or brief — the girls 
of the city had loosed their girdles for 
Ishtar and yielded themselves to anyone, 
stranger or neighbour, that asked. In 
the service of the goddess their brothers 
occasionally feigned that they too were 
girls. Meanwhile, from the summit of a 
seven-floored pyramid, mortals contem- 
plated the divine. 

Beneath was cosmopolis, the golden 
cup that, in the words of Jeremiah, made 
the whole world drunk. Seated im- 
mensely on the twin banks of the Eu- 
phrates — banks that bridges above and 
tunnels beneath inter joined — Babylon 
more nearly resembled a walled nation 
than a fortified town. Within the gates, 
in an enclosure ample and noble, a space 
that exceeded a hundred square miles, 
an area suflficient for Paris quintupled, 
observatories and palaces rose above the 
[103] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

roar of human tides that swept in waves 
through the wide boulevards, surged 
over the quays, flooded the gardens, 
eddied through the open-air lupanar, 
circled among statues of gods and bulls, 
poured out of the hundred gates, or broke 
against the polychrome walls and seethed 
back in the avenues, along which, to the 
high flourishes of military bands, passed 
armed hoplites, merchants in long robes, 
cloaked bedouins, Kelts in bearskins, 
priests in spangled dresses, tiara'd princes, 
burdened slaves, kings discrowned, fur- 
tive forms — prostitutes, pederasts, hu- 
man wolves, vermin, sheep — the flux 
and reflux of the gigantic city. 

In that ocean, the captive Jews, if cap- 
tive they were, rolled ^ lost as a handful of 
salt spilt in the sea. Yet, from the depths, 
a few had swum up and, filtering adroitly, 
had reached the dignity of high place. 
[ 104 ] 



BEL-MARDUK 

One was pontiff. Others were viceroys. 
In addition to being pontiff, Daniel was 
chancellor of the realm. Ezra was rector 
of the university. As pontiff of a college 
of wizards, Daniel may have known the 
future. As Minister of Wisdom, Ezra 
may have known, what is quite as diflB- 
Gult, the past. For the moment there 
was but the present. Over it ruled Bel- 
shazzar. 

Yet, ruler though he was, there were 
powers potenter than his own: Baalim, 
outraged at the elevation of a parvenu 
god; apriesthood consequentlydisaffected ; 
and, without, at the gates, the foe. 

It would have been interesting to have 
assisted at the final festival when, be- 
neath Cyclopean arches, in the sunlight 
of clustered candelabra, amid the glitter 
of gold and white teeth, among the fair 
sultanas that were strewn like flowers 
[105] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

through the throne-room of the imperial 
court, Belshazzar lay, smiling, amused 
rather than annoyed at the impudent 
menace of Cyrus. 

Babylon was impregnable. He knew 
it. But the subtle Jews, the indignant 
gods, the alienated priests to whom the 
Persian was a redeemer, of these he did 
not think. Daniel had indeed warned 
him and, vaguely, he had promised some- 
thing which he had since forgot. 

Beyond, an orchestra was playing. 
Further yet, columns upheld a ceiling so 
lofty that it was lost. On the adjacent 
wall was a frieze of curious and chimeri- 
cal beasts. Belshazzar was looking at 
them. In their dumb stupidity was a 
suggestion of the foe. The suggestion 
amused. Smiling still he raised a cup. 
Abruptly, before it could reach his lips, 
it fell with a clatter on the lapis lazuli of 
[106] 



BEL-MARDUK 

the floor beneath. Before him, on that 
wall, beneath those beasts, the necro- 
mancy of the priesthood had projected an 
armless, fluidic hand that mounted, de- 
scended, tracing with a forefinger the 
three luminous hierograms of his doom. 

The story, a little drama, was, with the 
tale concerning Nebuchadnezzar, that of 
Daniel, and other novels quite as strange, 
evolved long later in the wide leisures of 
Jerusalem. The fluidic hand did not 
appear. Even had it zigzagged there was 
no Belshazzar to frighten. 

Only the doom was real. Cyrus was 
clothed with it. To the trumpetings of 
heralds and the sheen of angels' wings, 
triumphantly he came. Then, presently, 
by royal decree, the Jews, manumitted 
and released, retraced their steps, bur- 
dened with spoil; with the lore of two 
distinct civilizations, which, fusing in the 
[107] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

great square letters of the Pentateuch, 
was to become the poetry of all mankind. 
Bayblon, ultimately, with her goblin 
gods and harlot goddess, sank into her 
own Aralu. Nourished there on dust, 
Lilit, with the sister vampires of eternal 
night, fed on her. 



[108] 



JEHOVAH 

ACAMEL'S-HAIR tent set in the 
desert was the first cathedral, the 
eariiest cloister of latest ideals. Set not 
in one desert merely but in two, in the 
infinite of time as well as in that of space, 
there was about it a limitlessness in which 
the past could sleep, the future awake, 
and into which all things, the human, the 
divine, gods and romance, could enter. 

The human came first. Then the gods. 
Then romance. The divine was their 
triple expansion. It was an after growth, 
in other lands, that tears had watered. 
In the desert it was unimagined. Only 
the gods had been conceived. 
[109] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

The gods were many and yet but one. 
Though plural they were singular. The 
subjects of impersonal verbs, they repre- 
sented the pronoun in such expressions 
as: it rains; it thunders. "It'' was 
Elohim. Already among nomad Semites 
monotheism had begun. Yet with this 
distinction. Each tribe had separate sets 
of Its that guided, guarded, and scourged. 
Omnipresent but not omnipotent, any 
humiliation to the family that they had 
in charge humiliated them. It made 
them angry, therefore vindictive, conse- 
quently unjust. It may be that they 
were not very ethical. Perhaps the 
bedouins were not either. Man fashions 
his god in proportion to his intelligence. 
That of the nomad was slender. He 
lacked, what the Aryan shepherd pos- 
sessed, the ability for mythological inven- 
tion. The defect was due to his speech, 
[110] 



JEHOVAH 

which did not lend itself to the deification 
of epithets. Even had it done so, it is 
probable that his mode of life would have 
rendered the paraphernalia of polytheism 
impossible. People constantly moving 
from place to place could not be cum- 
bered with idols. The Elohim were, 
therefore, a convenience for travellers 
and an unidolatrous monotheism a neces- 
sity which the absence of vehicles imposed. 
On the other hand, given every facility, 
it is presumable that the result would 
have been the same. Mythology is the 
mother of poetry. Idolatry is the father of 
art. Neither could appeal to a people to 
whom delicacy was an unknown god. Had 
it been known and a fetish, they could not 
have become the practical people that they 
are. Even then they were shrewd. Their 
Elohim might alarm but never delude. 
Israel was uncheatable even in dream. 
[Ill] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

Originally emigrants from Arabia, the 
nomads reached Syria, some directly, 
others circuitously, by way of Padan- 
Aram and across the Euphrates, whence 
perhaps their name of Ibrim or Hebrews 
— Those from beyond. In the journey 
Babel and Ur must have detained. These 
cities, with their culture relatively deep 
and their observatories equally high, be- 
came, in after days, a source of legend, of 
wonder, of hatred, perhaps of revelation 
as well. 

At the time the nomads had no cos- 
mogony or theories. The Chaldeans had 
both. There was a story of creation, an- 
other of antediluvian kings and of the 
punishment that overtook them. There 
was also a story of an emir of Ur, an old 
man who had benevolently killed an ani- 
mal instead of his son. The story, like 
the others, must have impressed. In 
[112] 



JEHOVAH 

after years the old man became Abraham, 
a great person, who had conversed with 
the Elohim and whose descendants they 
were. 

The story of creation also impressed. 
It was enlightening and comprehensible. 
The parallel theory of spontaneous gen- 
eration and the progressive evolution of 
the species which the magi entertained, 
they probably never heard. Even other- 
wise it was too complex for minds as yet 
untutored. The fables alone appealed. 
Mentally compressed into portable shape, 
carried along, handed down, their origin 
afterward forgotten, they became the 
traditions of a nation, which, eminently 
conservative, preserved what it found, 
among other things the name, perhaps 
inharmonious, of Jhvh.^ 



^Renan: Histoire du peuple d'lsrael. Kuenen: De 
Godsdienst van Israel. 

[113] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

That name, since found on an inscrip- 
tion of Sargon, appears to have been the 
title of a local god of Sinai, whom the 
nomads may have identified with Elohim, 
particularly, perhaps, since he presided 
over thunder, the phenomenon that 
alarmed them most and which, in con- 
sequence, inspired the greatest awe. That 
awe they put into the name, the pronun- 
ciation of which, like the origin of their 
traditions, they afterward forgot. In sub- 
sequent rabbinical writings it became 
Shem, the Name; Shemhammephoresh, 
the Revealed Name, uttered but once a 
year, on the day of Atonement, by the 
high priest in the Holy of Holies. Men- 
tion of it by anyone else was deemed a 
capital offence, though, permissibly, it 
might be rendered El Shaddai, the Al- 
mighty. That term the Septuagint trans- 
lated into 6 Kv/)to9, a Greek form, in the 
[114] 



JEHOVAH 

singular, of the Aramaic plural Adonai, 
which means Baalim, or sun lords. 

That form the Vulgate gave as Dominus 
and posterior theology as God. The 
latter term, common to all Teutonic 
tongues, has no known meaning. It 
designates that which, to the limited in- 
telligence of man, has been, and must be, 
incomprehensible. But the original term 
Jhvh, which, in the seventeenth century, 
was developed into Jehovah, yet which, 
the vowels being wholly conjectural, 
might have been developed into anything 
else, clearly appealed to wayfarers to 
whom Chaldean science was a book that 
remained closed until Nebuchadnezzar 
blew their descendants back into the 
miraculous Babel of their youth. 

Meanwhile, apart from the name — 
now generally written Jahveh — apart 
too from the fables and the enduring 
[115] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

detestation which the colossal city in- 
spired, probably but one other thing 
impressed, and that was the observance 
of the Sabbath. To a people whose 
public works were executed by forced 
labour, such a day was a necessity. To 
vagrants it was not, and, though the 
custom interested, it was not adopted 
by them until their existence from nomad 
had become fixed. 

At this latter period they were in 
Kanaan. Whether in the interval a tribe, 
the Beni-Israel, went down into Egypt, 
is a subject on which Continental scholar- 
ship has its doubts. The early life of the 
tribe's leader and legislator is usually 
associated with Rameses II., a pharaoh 
of the XIX. dynasty. But it has been 
found that incidents connected with 
Moses must apparently have occurred, 
if they occurred at all, at a period not 
[116] 



JEHOVAH 

earlier than the XXVI. dynasty, which 
constitutes a minimum difference of seven 
hundred years. Yet, in view of the 
decalogue, with its curious analogy to 
the negative confession in the Book of 
the Dead; in view also of a practice sur- 
gical and possibly hygienic which, cus- 
tomary among the Egyptians, was adopted 
by the Jews; in view, further, of cere- 
monies and symbols peculiarly Egyptian 
that were also absorbed, a sojourn in 
Goshen there may have been. 

The spoiling of the Egyptians, a 
roguery on which Israel afterward prided 
herself, is a trait perhaps too typical to 
be lightly dismissed. On the other hand, 
if Moses were, which is at least problem- 
atic, and if, in addition to being, he was 
both the nephew of a pharaoh and the 
son-in-law of a priest, as such one to 
whom, in either quality, the arcana of 
[117] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

the creed would be revealed, it becomes 
curious that nowhere in the Pentateuch 
is there any doctrine of a future life. Of 
the entire story, it may be that only the 
journey into the Sinaiatic peninsula is 
true, and of that there probably re- 
mained but tradition, on which history 
was based much later, by writers who 
had only surmises concerning the time 
and circumstances in which it occurred. 
Yet equally with the roguery, Moses 
may have been. Seen through modern 
criticism his figure fades though his name 
persists. To that name the Septuagint 
tried to give an Egyptian flavour. In 
their version it is always Mcjvcnj^;^ a com- 
pound derived from the Egyptian mo, 
water, and uses, saved from, or Saved- 
from-the-water.^ Per contra, the Hebrew 
form Mosheh is, as already indicated, the 

^ Josephus : Antiq. ii. 9. 
[118] 



JEHOVAH 

same as the Babylonian Masu, a term 
which means at once leader and littera- 
teur, in addition to being the cognomen 
of a god.^ 

Moses is said to have led his people out 
of bondage. He was the writer to whom 
the Pentateuch has been ascribed. But 
he was also a prophet. In Babylon, the 
god of prophecy was Nebo. It was on 
Mount Nebo that Jahveh commanded 
the prophet of Israel to die. Moreover, 
the divinity that had Masu for cognomen 
was, as is shown by a Babylonian text, 
the primitive god of the sun at Nippur, 
but the sun at noon, at the period of its 
greatest effulgence, at the hour when it 
wars with whatever opposes, when it 
wars as Jahveh did, or as the latter may 
be assumed to have warred, since Isaiah 
represented him as a mighty man, roar- 

^ Sayce : The Religion of the Babylonians. 
[119] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTL\XD 

ing at his enemies, exciting the fury of 
the fight, marching personally to the con- 
flict, and, in the Fourth Roll of the Law 
(Numbers), there is mention of a book 
entitled: The Wars of Jahveh, 

^Miether, then, Moses is but a com- 
posite of things Babylonian fused in an 
effort to show a link between a god and 
a people, is conjectural. But it is also 
immaterial. The one instructive fact is 
that, in a retrospect, the god, immediately 
after the exodus, became dictator. 

Yet even in the later age, when the 
retrospect was effected, conceptions were 
evidently immature. On one occasion 
the god met Moses, tried to kill him, but 
finally let him go. The picture is that 
of a personal struggle.^ Again, the spec- 
tacle of his back which he vouchsafed to 
Moses is construable onlv as an arriere- 

' Exodus iv. 24-26. 
[120] 



JEHOVAH 

penseej unless it be profound philosophy, 
unless it be taken that the face of God 
represents Providence, to see which would 
be to behold the future, whereas the back 
disclosed the past. 

It is, however, hardly probable that that 
construction occurred to the editors of 
the Pentateuch, who, elsewhere, repre- 
sented Jahveh as a butcher, insatiable, 
jealous, vindictive, treacherous, and vain, 
one that consigned all nations other than 
Israel to ruin and whom a poet repre- 
sented trampling people in anger, mak- 
ing them drunk with his fury, and defiling 
his raiment with blood.* 

But in the period related in Exodus, 
Jahveh was but the tutelary god of an 
itinerant tribe that, in its gipsy lack of 
territorial possessions, was not even a 
nation. Like his people he too was a 

^ Isaiah Ixiii. 1-6. 
[ 121 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

vagrant. Like them he had no home. 
Other gods had temples and altars. He 
lacked so much as a shrine. In pre- 
figurement of the Wandering Jew, each 
day he moved on. The threats of a land 
that never smiled were rejflected in his 
face. The sight of him was death. Cer- 
tainly he was terrible. 

This conception, corrected by later 
writers, was otherwise revised. In the 
interim Jahveh himself was transformed. 
He became El, the god; presently El 
Shaddai, God Almighty. In the ascen- 
sion former traits disappeared. He de- 
veloped into the deity of emphatic right. 
Morality, hitherto absent from, religion, 
entered into it. Israel, who perhaps 
had been careless, who, like Solomon, had 
followed Ishtar, became austere. There- 
after, Judaism, of which Christianity and 
Muhammadanismwere the after thoughts, 
[122] 



JEHOVAH 

was destined to represent almost the sum 
total of the human conscience. 

But in Kanaan, during the rude be- 
ginnings, though Jahveh was jealous, 
Ishtar, known locally as Ashtoreth, al- 
lured. Conjointly with Baal, the in- 
digenous term for Bel, circumadjacently 
she ruled. The propitiatory rites of these 
fair gods were debauchery and infanti- 
cide, the loosening of the girdles of girls, 
the thrusting of children into fires. It may 
be that these ceremonies at first amazed 
the Hebrews. But conscientiously they 
adopted them, less perhaps through zeal 
than politeness; because, in this curious 
epoch, on entering a country it was 
thought only civil to serve the divinities 
that were there, in accordance with the 
ritual that pleased them. 

With the mere mortal inhabitants, 
Israel was less ceremonious. Com- 
[123] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

manded by Jahveh to kill, extermination 
was but an act of piety. It was then, 
perhaps, that the Wars of Jahveh were 
sung, a paean that must have been reso- 
nant with cries, with the death-rattle of 
kingdoms, with the shouts of the invading 
host. From the breast-plates of the 
chosen, the terror of Sinai gleamed. Men 
could not see their faces and live. The 
moon was their servant. To aid them 
the sun stood still. They encroached, 
they slaughtered, they quelled. In the 
conquest a nation was born. From that 
bloody cradle the God of Humanity came. 
But around and about it was vacancy. 
In emerging from one solitude the Jews 
created another. They have never left 
it. The desert which they made des- 
tined them to be alone on this earth, as 
their god was to be solitary in heaven. 
Meanwhile there had been no kings in 
[ 124 ] 



JEHOVAH 

Israel. With the nation royalty came. 
David followed Saul. After him was 
Solomon. It is presumably at this period 
that traditions, orally transmitted from a 
past relatively remote, were first put in 
writing. Previously it is conjectural if 
the Jews could write. If they could, it is 
uncertain whether they made any use of 
the ability other than in the possible 
compilation of toledoth, such as the Book 
of the Generations of Adam and the Wars 
of Jahvehy works that, later, may have 
served as data for the Pentateuch. Even 
then, the compositions must have been 
crude, and such rolls as existed may have 
been lost when Nebuchadnezzar over- 
turned Jerusalem. 

Presumably, it was not until the post- 
exilic period that, under the editorship 
perhaps of Ezra, the definitive edition of 
the Torah was produced. This suppo- 
[125] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

sition existing texts support. In Genesis 
(xxxvii. 31) it is written: ^' These are 
the kings of Edom before there reigned 
any king over the children of Israel." 
The passage shows, if it shows an}i:hing, 
that there were, or had been, kings in 
Israel at the time when the passage itself 
was written. It is, therefore, at least 
post-Davidic. In Genesis another pas- 
sage (xlix. 10) says: ''The sceptre shall 
not pass from Judah until Shiloh come.'' 
Judah was the tribe that became pre- 
eminent in Israel after the captivity. 
The passage is therefore post-exiHc, 
consequently so is Genesis, and ob\4- 
ously the rest of the Pentateuch as 
well. Or, if not ob\dously, perhaps 
demonstrably. In II Esdras xiv. 22-48 
it is stated that the writer, a candle of 
understanding in his heart, and aided by 
five swift scribes, recomposed the Law, 
[126] 



JEHOVAH 

which, previously burned, was known to 
none. 

The burning referred to is what may, 
perhaps, be termed religious fiction. 
Barring toledoth and related data that 
may have been lost, the Law had al- 
most certainly not existed before, and 
this post-exilic romance concerning it was 
evolved in a laudable effort to show its 
Mosaic source. What is true of the Law 
is, in a measure, true of the Prophets. 
None of them anterior to Cyrus, all 
are later than Alexander. Spiritually 
very near to Christianity, chronologi- 
cally they are neighbourly too. If not 
divinely inspired, they at least disclosed 
the ideal. 

Previously the ideal had not perhaps 
been very apparent. Apart from seces- 
sions, rebellions, concussions, convulsions 
that deified Hatred until Jahveh, in the 
[ 127 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

person of Nebuchadnezzar, talked As- 
syrian, and then, in the person of Cyrus, 
talked Zend, the god of Israel, even in 
Israel, was not unique. He had a home, 
his first, the Temple, built gorgeously by 
Solomon, where invisibly, mysteriously, 
perhaps terribly, beneath the wings of 
cherubim that rose from the depths of the 
Holy of Holies, he dwelled. But the 
shrine, however ornate, was not the only 
one. There were other altars, other gods; 
the plentiful sanctuaries of Ashera, of 
Moloch and of Baal. On the adjacent 
hilltops the phallus stood. In the neigh- 
bouring groves the kisses of Ishtar con- 
sumed. 

The Lady of Girdles was worshipped 
there not by men and women only, but 
by girls with girls; by others too, not in 
couples, but singly, girls who in their 
solitary devotions had instruments for 
[128] 



JEHOVAH 

aid.* Religion, as yet, had but the slight- 
est connection with morality, a circum- 
stance explicable perhaps by the fact that 
it resumed the ethnical conscience of a 
race. Between the altar of El Shaddai 
and the shrines of other gods there were 
many differences, of which geography was 
the least. Jahveh, from a tutelary god, 
had indeed become the national divinity 
of a chosen people. But the Moabites 
were the chosen people of Chemos; the 
Ammonites were the chosen people of 
Rimmon; the Babylonians were the chosen 
people of Bel. The title conferred no 
distinction. As a consequence, to differ- 
erentiate Jahveh from all other gods, and 
Israel from all other people, to make the 
one unique and the other pontiff and 
shepherd of the nations of the world, be- 

* C/. Deut. xxiii. 17, where ^aldmoth (puellae) is 
rendered in the Sapphist sense. Ezekiel xvi. 17. 
Fecisti tibi imagines masculinas, 

[ 129 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

came the dream of anonymous poets, one 
that prophets, sometimes equally anony- 
mous, proclaimed. It was the prophets 
that reviled the false gods, denounced 
the abominations of Ishtar, and purified 
the Israelite heart. While nothing dis- 
cernible, or even imaginable, menaced, 
however slightly, the great empires of that 
day, the prophets were the first to realize 
that the Orient was dead. When the 
Christ announced that the end of the 
world was at hand, he but reiterated an- 
terior predictions that presently were ful- 
filled. A world did end. That of 
antiquity ceased to be. 

It was the prophets that foretold it. 
Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and, it may 
be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius 
which itself, while madness, is a madness 
wholly divine, they heralded the future, 
they established the past. Abraham they 
[130] 



JEHOVAH 

drew from allegory, Moses from myth. 
They made them live, and so immortally 
that one survives in Islam, the other in 
words that are a law of grace for all. 

If, in visions possibly ecstatic, they be- 
held heights that lost themselves in im- 
mensity, and saw there an ineflfable name 
seared by forked flames on a tablet of 
stone; if that spectacle and the theophany 
of it were but poetry, the decalogue is a 
fact, one so solid that though ages have 
gone, though empires have crumbled, 
though the customs of man have altered, 
though the sky itself have changed, still 
is obeyed the commandment: Thou shalt 
have no other gods before me. 

From Chemos in Moab, from Rimon 
among the Ammonites, no such edict 
had come. It felled them. Amon-Ra 
it tore from the celestial Nile, and Bel- 
Marduk from the Silver Sky. The Re- 
[131] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

faim hid them in shadows as surely as 
they buried there the high and potent 
lords of Greece and Rome. These inter- 
ments, completed by others, the prophets 
began. For it was they who, in addition 
to the command, revealed the command- 
ant, creator of whatever is: the Being 
Absolute that abhorred evil, loved right- 
eousness, punished the transgressor and 
rewarded the just; El Shaddai, then really 
Lord of Hosts. 

It may be that already in Israel there 
had been some prescience of this. But it 
lacked the authority of inspired text. 
The omission was one that only seers 
could remedy. It was presumably in 
these circumstances that an agreement 
was imagined which, construed as a con- 
dition of a covenant, assumed to have 
been made with Abraham, was further 
assumed to have been renewed to Moses. 
[ 132 ] 



JEHOVAH 

The resulting poetry was enveloped 
in a romance of which Continental 
scholarship has discovered two versions, 
woven together, perhaps by Ezra, into a 
single tale. 

"In the beginning Elohim created the 
heaven and earth/' That abrupt decla- 
ration, presented originally in but one of 
the versions, had already been pro- 
nounced of Indra and also of Ormuzd. 
The Hebraic announcement alone pre- 
vailed. It emptied the firmament of its 
monsters, dislodged the gods from the 
skies, and enthroned there a deity at first 
multiple but subsequently unique. After- 
ward seraphs and saints might replace 
the evaporated imaginings of other creeds; 
Satan might create a world of his own 
and people it with the damned; theology 
might evolve from elder faiths a newer 
trinity and set it like a diadem in space; 
[ 133 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

angels and archangels might refill the 
devastated heavens of the past; none the 
less, in the light of that austere pronounce- 
ment, for a moment Israel dwelled in 
contemplation of the Ideal. 

At the time it is probable that the story 
of the love of the sons of Jahveh for the 
daughters of men, together with the 
pastel of Eden as it stands to-day, were 
not contained in existing accounts of 
that ideal. These legends, which re- 
garded as legends are obviously false, but 
which, construed as allegories, may be 
profoundly true, were probably not dif- 
fused until after the captivity, when Israel 
was not more subtle, that is not possible, 
but, by reason of her contact with Persia, 
more wise. 

The origin of evil these myths related 
but did not explain. Since then, from 
no church has there come an adequate 
[ 134 ] 



JEHOVAH 

explanation of the malediction under 
which man is supposed to labour because 
of the natural propensities of beings that 
never were. That explanation these 
myths, which orthodoxy has gravely, 
though sometimes reluctantly, accepted, 
both provide and conceal. They date 
possibly from the Ormuzdian revelation: 
"In the beginning was the living 
Word." 

John, or more exactly his homonym, 
repeated the pronouncement, adding: 
"The word was made flesh.'' But, save 
for a mention of the glory which he had 
before the world was, he omitted to 
further follow the thought of Ormuzd, 
who, in describing paradise to Zara- 
thrustra, likened it, in every way, to 
heaven. There the first beings were, 
exempt from physical necessities, pure 
intelligencies, naked as the compilers of 
[135] 



THE LORDS OF THE GH05TLAND 

Grenesis translated, naked and unashamed, 
but naked and unashamed because in- 
corporeal, unincarnate and clothed in 
light, a vestment which they exchanged 
for a garment of flesh, coats of skin as it 
is in Genesis, when, descended on earth, 
their intelHgence, previously luminous, 
swooned in the senses of man. 

In Egypt, the harper going out from 
Amenti sang: ''Life is death in a land of 
darkness, death is life in a land of Hght." 
There perhaps is the origin of e^'il. 
There too perhaps is its cure. But the 
view accepted there too is pre-existence 
and persistence, a doctrine blasphemous 
to the Jew as it was to the Ass}Tian, to 
whom the gods alone were immortal, and 
to whom, in consequence, immortal beings 
would be gods. In the creed of both, 
man was essentially evanescent. To the 
Hebrew, he Uved a few, brief days and 
[136] 



JEHOVAH 

then went down into silence, where no 
remembrance is. There, gathered among 
the Refaim to his fathers, he remained 
forever, unheeded by God. 

The conception, passably rationalistic 
and not impossibly correct, veiled the 
beautiful allegory that was latent in the 
Eden myth. It had the further defect, 
or the additional advantage, of eliminat- 
ing any theory of future punishment and 
reward. In lieu of anything of the kind, 
there was a doctrine that evil, in produc- 
ing evil, automatically punished itself. 
The doctrine is incontrovertible. But, 
for corollary, went the fallacy that virtue 
is its own reward. Against that idea 
Job protested so energetically that me- 
diaeval monks were afraid to read what 
he wrote. Yet it was perhaps in demon- 
stration of the real significance of the 
allegory that a spiritualistic doctrine — 
[137] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

always an impiety to the orthodox — was 
insinuated by the Pharisees and instilled 
by the Christ. 

The basis of it rested perhaps partially 
in the idealism of the prophets. The 
clamour of their voices awoke the dead. 
It transformed the skies. It transfigured 
Jahveh. It divested him of attributes 
that were human. It outlined others 
that were divine. It awoke not merely 
the dead, but the consciousness that a 
god that ha4 a proper name could not be 
the true one. Thereafter mention of it 
was avoided. The vowels were dropped. 
It became unpronounceable, therefore in- 
communicable. For it was substituted 
the term vaguer, and therefore more 
exact, of Lord, one in whose service were 
fulfilled the words of Isaiah: "I am the 
first and I am the last, and beside me 
there is no God." 

[138] 



JEHOVAH 

In the marvel of that miraculous reali- 
zation were altitudes hitherto undreamed, 
peaks from whose summits there was 
discernible but the valleys beneath, and 
another height on which stood the Son 
of man. Yet marvellous though the reali- 
zation was, instead of diminishing, it in- 
creased. It did not pass. It was not 
forgot. Ceaselessly it augmented. 

In the Scriptures there are many mar- 
vels. That perhaps is the greatest. Amon, 
originally an obscure provincial god of 
Thebes, became the supreme divinity 
of Egypt. Bel, originally a local god of 
Nippur, became in Babylon Lord of 
Hosts. But Jahveh, originally the tute- 
lary god of squalid nomads, became the 
Deity of Christendom. The fact is one 
that any scholarship must admit. It is 
the indisputable miracle of the Bible. 

[139] 



I 



VI 

ZEUS 

N Judea, when Jahveh was addressed, 
he answered, if at all, with a thunder- 
clap. Since then he has ceased to reply. 
Zeus was more complaisant. One might 
enter with him into the intimacy of the 
infinite. The father of the Graces, the 
Muses, the Hours, it was natural that he 
should be debonair. But he had other 
children. Among them were Litai, the 
Prayers. In the Vedas, where Zeus was 
born, the Prayers upheld the skies. 
Lame and less lofty in Greece, they could 
but listen and intercede. 

The detail is taken from Homer. In 
his Ionian Pentateuch is the statement 
[140] 



ZEUS 

that beggars are sent by Zeus, that who- 
ever stretches a hand is respectable in his 
eyes, that the mendicant who is repulsed 
may perhaps be a god ^ — suggestions 
which, afterward, were superiorly re- 
sumed in the dictum: "Inasmuch as ye 
have done it unto the least of these my 
brethren, ye have done it unto me/' 

The Litai were not alone in their oflSces. 
There were the oracles of Delphi, of 
Trophonios and of Mopsos, where one 
might converse with any divinity, even 
with Pan, who was a very great god. 
But Olympos was neighbourly. It was 
charming too. There was unending 
spring there, eternal youth, immortal 
beauty, the harmonies of divine honey- 
moons, the ideal in a golden dream; 
a stretch of crystal parapets, from which, 
leaning and laughing, radiant goddesses 

^ Odyssey, xviii. 485, v. 447, xiv. 56. 
[ 141 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTIAND 

and resplendent gods looked down, and 
to whom a people, adolescent still, looked 
up. 

In that morning of delight fear was 
absent, mystery was replaced by joy. 
The pageantry of the hours may have 
been too near to nature to know of shame, 
it was yet too close to the divine to know 
of hate. Man, then, for the first time, 
loved what he worshipped and worshipped 
what he loved. His brilliant and musical 
Bible moved his heart without torment- 
ing it. It conducted but did not con- 
strain. It taught him that in death all 
are equal and that in life the noble- 
minded are serene. 

In the Genesis of this Bible there is an 
account of a golden age and of a paradise 
into which evil was introduced by woman. 
The account is Hesiod's, to whom the 
Orient had furnished the details. It may 
[ 142 ] 



ZEUS 

be that both erred. If ever there were a 
golden age it must have been in those 
days when heaven was on earth and, 
minghng famiharly with men, were pro- 
cessions of gods, gods of love, of light, of 
liberty, thousands of them, not one of 
whom had ever heard an atheist's voice. 
Related to humanity, of the same blood, 
sons of the same Aryan mother, they dif- 
fered from men only in that the latter 
died because they were real, while they 
were deathless because ideal. 

The ideal was too fair. Presently 
Pallas became the soul of Athens. But 
meanwhile from the East there strayed 
swarms of enigmatic faces; the harlot 
handmaids of her Celestial Highness 
Ishtar, Princess of Heaven; the mutilated 
priests of Tammuz her lover; dual con- 
ceptions that resulted in Aphrodite Pan- 
demos, the postures of Priapos, the leer of 
[143] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

the Lampsacene, and, with them, forms 
of worship comparable, in the circum- 
adjacent beauty, to latrinae in a garden, 
ignoble shapes that violated the candour 
of maidens' eyes, but with which Greece 
became so accustomed that on them 
moral aphorisms were engraved. '^In 
the mind of Hellas, these things," Renan, 
with his usual unctuousness, declared, 
"awoke but pious thoughts/' 

Pious at heart Hellas was. Even art, 
which now is wholly profane, with her 
was wholly sacred. The sanctity was 
due to its perfection. The perfection 
was such that imbeciles who fancy that 
it has been or could be surpassed show 
merely that they know nothing about it. 
At Athens, where Pheidias created a 
palpable Olympos, Pallas stood colos- 
sally, a torch in her hand, a lance at her 
shoulder, a shield at her side, a plastron 
[144] 



ZEUS 

of gold on her immaculate breast, a 
golden robe about her ivory form, and 
on her immortal brow a crown of gold, 
beneath which, sapphire eyes, that saw 
and foresaw, glittered. To-day the place 
where the marvellous creation stood is 
vacant. With the gorgeous host Pallas 
has departed. But the torch she held 
still burns. From the emptiness of her 
virginal arms, that never were filled, pro- 
ceeds all civilization. 

Adjacently at Eleusis was Demeter. 
Pallas was the soul of Greece. Eleusis 
was the Jerusalem, Demeter the Ma- 
donna. 

Demeter — the earth, the universal 
mother — had, in a mystic hymen with 
her brother Zeus, conceived Persephone. 
The latter, when young and a maiden, 
beckoned perhaps by Eros, wandered 
from Olympos and was gathering flowers 
[ 145 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

when Pluto, borne by black horses, 
erupted, raped her, and tore her away. 
The cries of the indignant Demeter 
sterilized the earth. To assuage her, 
Zeus undertook to have Persephone re- 
covered, provided that in Hades, of which 
Pluto was lord, she had eaten nothing. 
But the girl had — a pomegranate grain. 
It was the irrevocable. Demeter yielded, 
as the high gods had to yield, to what 
was higher than they, to Destiny. Mean- 
while, in the shadows below, Persephone 
was transfigured. 

Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons 

that laugh and that weep; 
For these give joy and sorrow : but thou, Proserpina, 

sleep. . . . 

daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and 

blossom of birth, 

1 am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth. 
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, 

the night where thou art, 
[ 146 ] 



ZEUS 

Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep 

overflows from the heart, . . . 
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of 

gods from afar 
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul 

of a star. 
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens un- 

trod by the sun, 
Let my soul with their souls find place and forget what 

was done or undone. 
Thou art more than the gods that number the days 

of our temporal breath 
For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proser- 
pina, death. 

Like Hesiod, Swinburne erred, though 
perhaps intentionally, as poets should, for 
the greater glory of the Muses. Per- 
sephone brought not death but life. The 
aisles of despair she filled with hope. 
Transfigured herself, Pluto she trans- 
formed. She changed what had been 
hell into what was to be purgatory. It 
[147] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

was not yet Elysium, but it was no longer 
Hades. Plato said that those who were 
in her world had no wish at all for 
this. 

It is for that reason that Demeter is the 
Madonna of Greece, as her ethereal 
daughter was the saviour. The myth of 
it all, brought by Pythagoras from Egypt 
is very old. Known in Memphis, it was 
known too in Babylon, perhaps before 
Memphis was. But the legend of Isis 
and that of Ishtar — both of whom de- 
cended into hell — lack the transparent 
charm which this idyl unfolds and of 
which the significance was revealed only 
to initiate in epiphanies at Eleusis. 

Before these sacraments Greece stood, 
a finger to her lips. Yet the whispers 
from them that have reached us, while 
furtive perhaps, are clear. They fur- 
nished the poets with notes that are 
[148] 



ZEUS 

resonant still. They lifted the drama to 
heights that astound. Even in the fancy 
balls of Aristophanes, where men were 
ribald and the gods were mocked, sud- 
denly, in the midst of the orgy, laughter 
ceased, obscenities were hushed. Afar 
a hymn resounded. It was the chorus 
of the Initiate going measured ly by. 

The original mysteries were Hermetic. 
Enterable only after a prolonged novi- 
tiate, the adept then beheld an unfolding 
of the theosophy of the soul. In visions, 
possibly ecstatic, he saw the series of its 
incarnations, the seven cycles through 
which it passed, the Ship of a Million 
Years on which the migrations are effected 
and on which, at last, from the Valley of 
the Shadow of Death, it sails to its primal 
home. 

That home was colour, its sustenance 
light. There, in ethereal evolutions, its 
[ 149 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAXD 

incarnations began. At first unsubstan- 
tial and wholly ineffable, these turned for 
it every object into beauty, every sound 
into joy. Without needs, from beatitude 
to beatitude blissfully it floated. But, 
subjected to the double attraction of 
matter and of sin, the initiate saw the 
memories and attributes of its spirituality 
fade. He saw it flutter, and fluttering 
sink. He saw that in sinking it enveloped 
itself in garments that grew heavier at 
each descent. Through the denser cloth- 
ing he saw the desires of the flesh pulsate. 
He saw them force it lower, still lower, 
until, fallen into its earthly tenement, it 
swooned in the senses of man. From the 
chains of that prison he learned that 
the souFs one escape was in a recovery of 
the memory of what it had been when it 
was other than what it had become. 
That memory the mysteries provided. 
[150] 



ZEUS 

Those of Eleusis differed from the Egyp- 
tian only in detail. At Eleusis, in lieu of 
visions, there were tableaux. Persephone, 
beckoned by desire, straying then from 
Olympos, afterward fainting in the arms 
of Pluto, but subsequently, while pre- 
paring her own reascension, saving and 
embellishing all that approach, was the 
symbol, in an Hellenic setting, of the fall 
and redemption of man. 

The human tragedy thus portrayed 
was the luminous counterpart of the dark 
dramas that Athens beheld. There, in 
the theatre — which itself was a church 
with the stage for [pulpit — man, blinded 
by passions, the Fates pursued and 
Destiny felled. 

The sombre spectacle was inexplicable. 

At Eleusis was enlightenment. *'Eskato 

Bebeloi'' — Out from here, the profane 

— the heralds shouted as the mysteries 

[151] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

began. "Konx ompax" — Go in peace 
— they called when the epiphanies were 
completed. 

In peace the initiate went, serenely, it is 
said, ever after. From them the load of 
ignorance was lifted. But what their im- 
pressions were is unrecorded. They were 
bound to secrecy. No one could learn 
what occurred without being initiated, or 
without dying. For death too is initiation. 

The mysteries were schools of immor- 
tality. They plentifully taught many a 
lesson that Christianity afterward in- 
stilled. But their drapery was perhaps 
over ornate. Truth does not need any. 
Truth always should be charming. Yet 
always it should be naked as well. About 
it the mysteries hung a raiment that was 
beautiful, but of which the rich embroi- 
deries obscured. The mysteries could 
not have been more fascinating, that is 
[152] 



ZEUS 

not possible, but, the myths removed, in 
simple nudity they would have been more 
clear. Doubtless it was for that very 
reason, in order that they might not be 
transparent, that the myths were em- 
ployed. It is for that very reason, per- 
haps, that Christianity also adopted a few. 
Yet at least from cant they were free. 
Among the multiple divinities of Greece, 
hypocrisy was the unknown god. Con- 
sideration of the others is, to-day, usually 
effected through the pages of Ovid. One 
might as well study Christianity in the 
works of Voltaire. Christianity's bright- 
est days were in the dark ages. The 
splendid glamour of them that persists 
is due to many causes, among which, in 
minor degree, may be the compelling 
glare of Greek genius. That glare, veiled 
in the mysteries, philosophy reflects. 
Philosophy is but the love of wisdom. 
[153] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

It began with Socrates. He had no be- 
lief in the gods. The man who has none 
may be very rehgious. But though Soc- 
rates did not believe in the gods he did 
not deny them. He did what perhaps 
was worse. He ignored their perfectly 
poetic existence. He was put to death 
for it, though only at the conclusion of a 
long promenade during which he deUvered 
Athenian youths of their intelligence. 
Facility in the operation may have been 
inherited. Socrates was the son of a 
midwife. His own progeny consisted in 
a complete transfiguration of Athenian 
thought. He told of an Intelligence, su- 
preme, ethical, just, seeing all, hearing 
all, governing all; a creator made not 
after the image of man but of the soul, 
and visible only in the conscience. It 
was for that he died. There was no 
such god on Olympos. 
[154] 



ZEUS 

There was an additional indictment. 
Socrates was accused of perverting the 
jeunesse doree. At a period when, every- 
where, save only in Israel, the abnormal 
was usual, Socrates was almost insultingly 
chaste. The perversion of which he was 
accused was not of that order. It was 
that of inciting lads to disobey their 
parents when the latter opposed what 
he taught. 

"I am come to set a man against his 
father,'' it is written in Matthew. The 
mission of Socrates was the same. Be- 
cause of it he died. He was the first 
martyr. But his death was overwhelm- 
ing in its simphcity. Even in fairyland 
there has been nothing more calm. By 
way of preparation he said to his judges : 
" Were you to offer to acquit me on con- 
dition that I no longer profess what I be- 
lieve, I would answer; * Athenians, I 
[ 155 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

honour and I love you, but a god has 
commanded me and that god I will obey, 
rather than you/" 

In the speech was irony, with which 
Athens was famihar. But it also dis- 
played a conception, wholly new, that of 
maintaining at any cost the truth. The 
novelty must have charmed. When Peter 
and the apostles were arraigned before 
the Sanhedrin, their defence consisted 
in the very words that Socrates had used : 
^' We should obey God rather than man.'' ^ 

Socrates wrote nothing. The Buddha 
did not either. Neither did the Christ. 
These had their evangelists. Socrates 
had also disciples who, as vehicle for his 
ideas, employed the nightingale tongue 
of beauty into which the Law and the 
Prophets were translated by the Septua- 
gint and into which the Gospels were put, 

^ Acts V. 29. 
[156] 



ZEUS 

It would be irreverent to suggest that 
the latter are in any way indebted to 
Socratic inspiration. It would be irrele- 
vant as welL For, while the Intelligence 
that Socrates preached differed as much 
from the volage and voluptuous Zeus as 
the God of Christendom differs from the 
Jahveh of Job, yet, in a divergence so 
wide, an idealist, very poor except in 
ideas; a teacher killed by those who knew 
not what they did; a philosopher that 
drained the cup without even asking that 
it pass from him; a mere reformer, though 
dangerous perhaps as every reformer worth 
the name must be; but, otherwise, a mere 
man like any other, only a little better, 
could obviously have had no share. For 
reasons not minor but major, Plato could 
have had none either. 

It is related that a Roman invader, 
sank back, stricken with deisidaimonia — 
[157] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

the awe that the gods inspired — at the 
sight of the Pheidian Zeus. It is with 
a wonder not cognate certainly, yet in a 
measure relative, that one considers what 
Socrates must have been if millennia have 
gone without producing one mind ap- 
proaching that of his spiritual heir. It 
was uranian ; but not disassociated from 
human things. 

Plato, like his master, was but a man 
in whom the ideal was intuitive, perhaps 
the infernal also. In the gardens of the 
Academe and along the banks of the 
Ilissus, he announced a Last Judgment. 
The announcement, contained in the 
Phcedo, had for supplement a picture that 
may have been Persian, of the righteous 
ascending to heaven and the wicked de- 
scending to hell. In the LawSy the pic- 
ture was annotated with a statement to 
the effect that whatever a man may do, 
[158] 



ZEUS 

there is an eye that sees him, a memory 
that registers and retains. In the Re- 
public he declared that afflictions are 
blessings in disguise. But his "Repub- 
lic," a Utopian commonwealth, was not, 
he said, of this world, adding in the 
Phoedo, that few are chosen though many 
are called. 

The mystery of the Catholicism of the 
Incas, reported back to the Holy Office, 
was there defined as an artifice of the 
devil. With finer circumspection, Chris- 
tian Fathers attributed the denser mystery 
of Greek philosophy to the inspiration of 
God- 

Certainly it is ample. As exemplified 
by Plato it has, though, its limitations. 
There is no charity in it. Plato preached 
humility, but there is none in his sermons. 
His thought is a winged thing, as the 
thought of a poet ever should be. But in 
[159] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

the expression of it he seems smiHng, 
disdainful, indifferent as a statue to the 
poverties of the heart. That too, perhaps, 
is as it should be. The high muse wears 
a radiant peplum. Anxiety is banished 
from the minds that she haunts. Then, 
also, if, in the nectar of Plato's speech, 
compassion is not an ingredient, it may be 
because, in his violet-crowned city, it was 
strewn open-handed through the beauti- 
ful streets. There, public malediction 
was visited on anyone that omitted to 
guide a stranger on his way. 

Israel was too strictly monotheistic to 
raise an altar to Pity, the rest of antiquity 
too cruel. In Athens there was one. In 
addition there were missions for the needy, 
asylums for the infirm. If anywhere, at 
that period, human sympathy existed, it 
was in Greece. The aristocratic silence 
of Plato may have been due to that fact. 
[160] 



ZEUS 

He would not talk of the obvious, though 
he did of the vile. In one of his books 
the then common and abnormal concep- 
tion of sexuality was, if not authorized, 
at least condoned. It is conjectural, how- 
ever, whether the conception was more 
monstrous than that which subsequent 
mysticity evolved. 

Said Ruysbroeck: "The mystic carries 
her soul in her hand and gives it to whom- 
soever she wishes." Said St. Francis of 
Sales: "The soul draws to itself motives 
of love and delectates in them.'' What 
the gift and what the delectation were, 
other saints have described. 

Marie de la Croix asserted that in the 
arms of the celestial Spouse she swam 
in an ocean of delight. Concerning that 
Spouse, Marie Alacoque added: "Like 
the most passionate of lovers he made me 
understand that I should taste what is 
[161] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

sweetest in the suavity of caresses, and 
indeed, so poignant were they, that I 
swooned/' The ravishments which St. 
Theresa experienced she expressed in 
terms of abandoned precision. Mme. 
Guyon wrote so carnally of the divine 
that Bossuet exclaimed; "Seigneur, if I 
dared, I would pray that a seraph with a 
flaming sword might come and purify 
my lips sullied by this recital/'^ 

Augustin pleasantly remarked that we 
are all born for hell. One need not agree 
with him. In the presence of the pos- 
sibly monstrous and the impossibly blas- 
phemous, there is always a recourse. It 
is to turn away, though it be to Zeus, a be- 
lief in whom, however stupid, is ennobling 
beside the turpitudes that Christian mys- 
ticism produced. 

At Athens, meanwhile, the religion of 

^ Relation sur le Quietisme. 
[162] 



ZEUS 

State persisted. So also did philosophy. 
When, occasionally, the two met, the 
latter bowed. That was suflScient. Re- 
ligion exacted respect, not belief. It 
was not a faith, it was a law, one that 
for its majesty was admired and for its 
poetry was beloved. In the deification 
of whatever is exquisite it was but an 
artistic cult. The real Olympos was the 
Pantheon. The other was fading away. 
Deeper and deeper it was sinkingback into 
the golden dream from which it had sprung. 
Further and further the crystal parapets 
were retreating. Dimmer and more dim 
the gorgeous host became. In words of 
perfect piety Epicurus pictured them in the 
felicity of the ideal. There, they had no 
heed of man, no desire for worship, no wish 
for prayer. It was unnecessary even to 
think of them. Decorously, with every 
homage, they were being deposed. 
[ 163 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

But if Epicurus was decorous, Eve- 
merus was devout. It was his endeavour, 
he said, not to undermine but to fortify. 
The gods he described as philanthropists 
whom a grateful world had deified. 
Zeus had waged a sacrilegious war against 
his father. Aphrodite was a harlot and 
a procuress. The others were equally 
commendable. Once they had all lived. 
Since then all had died. Evemerus had 
seen their tombs. 

One should not believe him. Their 
parapets are dimmer, perhaps, but from 
them still they lean and laugh. They 
are immortal as the hexameters in which 
their loves unfold. Yet, oddly enough, 
presently the oracle of Delphi strangled. 
In his cavern Trophonios was gagged. 
The voice of Mopsos withered. 

That is nothing. On the Ionian, the 
captain of a ship heard some one call- 
[ 164 ] 



ZEUS 

ing loudly at him from the sea. The 
passengers, who were at table, looked out 
astounded. Again the loud voice called: 
" Captain, when you reach shore announce 
that the great god Pan is dead.''^ 

It may be that it was true. It may be 
that after Pan the others departed. When 
Paul reached Athens he found a denuded 
Pantheon, a vacant Olympos, skies more 
empty stilL 



* Plutarch: de Oracul. defect. 14. 
[165] 



VII 

JUPITER 

THE name of the national deity of 
Israel is unpronounceable. The 
name of the national divinity of Rome is 
unknown. To all but the hierophants 
it was a secret. For uttering it a senator 
was put to death. But Tullius Hostilius 
erected temples to Fear and to Pallor. 
It may have been Fright. The conjec- 
ture is supported by the fact that^ as was 
usual, Rome had any number of deified 
epithets, as she had also a quantity of 
little bits of gods. These latter greatly 
amused the Christian Fathers. Among 
them was Alemona, who, in homely Eng- 
lish, was Wet-nurse. 

[166] 



JUPITER 

TertuUian, perhaps naively, remarked: 
"Superstition has invented these deities 
for whom we have substituted angels/' 
In addition to the diva mater Alemona 
was the divus pater Vaticanus, the holy 
father Vatican, who assisted at a child's 
first cry. There was the equally holy 
father Fabulin, who attended him in his 
earliest efforts at speech. Neither of 
them had anything else to do. 

Pavor had. At thunder, at lightning, 
at a meteor, at moisture on a wall, at no 
matter what, at silence even, the descend- 
ants of a she- wolf's nursling quailed. 
They lived in a panic. In panic the 
gods were born. It is but natural, per- 
haps, that Fright should have been held 
supreme. The other gods, mainly divini- 
ties of prey and of havoc, were lustreless 
as the imaginations that conceived them. 
Prosaic, unimaged, without poetry or 
[167] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

myth, they dully persisted until pedlars 
appeared with Hellenic legends and wares. 
To their tales Rome listened. Then 
eidolons of the Olympians became natu- 
ralized there. Zeus was transformed into 
Jupiter, Aphrodite into Venus, Pallas 
into Minerva, Demeter into Ceres, and 
all of them — and with them all the 
others — into an irritable police. The 
Greek gods enchanted, those of Rome 
alarmed. Plutarch said that they were 
indignant if one presumed to so much as 
sneeze. 

Worship, consequently, was a neces- 
sary precaution, an insurance against 
divine risks, a matter of business in 
which the devout bargained with the 
divine. Ovid represented Numa trying 
to elude the exigencies of Jove. The 
latter had demanded the sacrifice of a 
head. "You shall have a cabbage,'' 
[168] 



JUPITER 

said the king. "I mean something hu- 
man." "Some hairs then." "No, I 
want something ahve." "We will give 
you a pretty little fish." Jupiter laughed 
and yielded. That was much later, after 
Lucretius, in putting Epicurus into verse, 
had declared religion to be the mother of 
sin. By that time Fear and Pallor had 
struck terror into the very marrow of 
barbarian bones. Fright was a god more 
serviceable than Zeus. With him Rome 
conquered the world. Yet in the con- 
quest Fright became Might and the 
latter an effulgence of Jove's. 

Jove was magnificent. In the Capitol 
he throned so augustly that we swear by 
him still. Like Rome he is immortal. 
But Pavor, that had faded into him, was 
never invoked. The reason was not 
sacerdotal, it was political. Rome never 
imposed her gods on the quelled. With 
[169] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

superior tact she lured their gods from 
them. At any siege, that was her first 
device. To it she beUeved her victories 
were due. It was to avoid possible 
reprisals and to remain invincible, that 
her own national divinity she so carefully 
concealed that the name still is a secret. 
With the gods, Rome gathered the creeds 
of the world, set them like fountains 
among her hills, and drank of their sacred 
waters. Her early deity is unknown. 
But the secret of her eternity is in the 
religions that she absorbed. It was these 
that made her immortal. 

To that immortality the obscure god of 
an obscure people contributed largely, 
perhaps, but perhaps, too, not uniquely. 
Jahveh might have remained unperceived 
behind the veil of the sanctuary had not 
his altar been illuminated by lights from 
other shrines. In the early days of the 
[170] 



JUPITER 

empire, Rome was fully aware of the 
glamour of Amon, of the star of Ormuzd, 
Brahm's cerulean lotos and the rainbow 
heights of Bel-Marduk. But in the 
splendour of Jove all these were opaque. 
Jupiter, always imposing, was gran- 
diose then. His thoughts were vast as 
the sky. In a direct revelation to Vergil 
he said of his chosen people: "I have set 
no limits to their conquest or its duration. 
The empire I have given them shall be 
without end."^ Hebrew prophets had 
spoken similarly. Vergil must have been 
more truly inspired. The Roman empire, 
nominally holy, figuratively still exists. 
Yet fulfilment of the prophecy is due 
perhaps less to the God of the Gentiles 
than to the God of the Jews. Though 
perhaps also it may be permissible to dis- 
cern in the latter a transfiguration of 

^ iEneid i. 278. 
[1711 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

Jove, who originally Zeus, and primarily 
not Hellenic but Hindu, ultimately be- 
came supreme. After the terrific struggle 
which resulted in that final metamor- 
phosis, Jerusalem, disinherited, saw 
Rome the spiritual capital of the globe. 

Jerusalem was not a home of logic. 
Rome was the city of law. That law, 
cold, inflexible, passionless as a sword 
and quite as eflFective, Rome brandished 
at philosophy. It is said that the intel- 
lectual gymnastics of Greece were dis- 
pleasing to her traditions. It is more 
probable that augurs had foreseen or 
oracles had foretold that philosophy would 
divest her of the sword, and with it of her 
sceptre and her might. Ideas cannot be 
decapitated. Only ridicule can demolish 
them. Philosophy, mistress of irony, re- 
sisted while nations fell. It was phi- 
losophy that first undermined established 
[ 172 ] 



JUPITER 

creeds and then led to the pursuit of new 
ones. Yet it may be that a contributing 
cause was a curious theory that the world 
was to end. Foretold in the BrahmanaSy 
in the Avesta and in the Eddas, prob- 
ably it was in the Sibylline Books. If not, 
the subsequent Church may have so 
assumed. 

Dies irse, dies ilia, 
Solvet sseclum in f avilla, 
Teste David cum Sibylla. 

Not alone David and the Sibyl but 
Etruscan seers had seen in the skies that 
the tenth and last astronomical cycle had 
begun.^ Plutarch, in his life of Sylla, 
testified to the general belief in an ap- 
proaching cataclysm. Lucretius an- 
nounced that at any moment it might 
occur.2 That was in the latter days of 

* Censorinus: De die nat. 17. 
^ De rerum nat., v. 105. 

[173] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

the republic. In the early days of the 
empire the theory persisting may have 
induced the hope of a saviour. Suetonius 
said that nature in her parturitions was 
elaborating a king.^ Afterward he added 
that such was Asia's archaic belief.^ Re- 
cent discoveries have verified the asser- 
tion. In the Akkadian Epic of Dibbara 
a messiah was foretold.^ That epic, an- 
terior to a cognate Egyptian prophecy,* 
anterior also to the Sibylline Books^ was 
anterior too to the Hebrew prophets and 
necessarily to those of Rome. 

Among these was Vergil. In the fourth 
Eclogue he beheld an age of gold, pre- 
ceded by the advent on earth of a son of 
Jove, under whose auspices the last traces 
of sin and sorrow were to disappear and 
a new race descend from heaven. "The 

^ In Augusto, 74. ^ In Vesp. 4. 

^ Jastrow: op, cit. * See back. Chapter III. 

[174] 



JUPITER 

serpent shall die/' he declared, adding: 
"The time is at hand.'' 

The Eclogue was written 40 B.C., dur- 
ing the consulate of Pallio, whom the poet 
wished perhaps to flatter. Then pres- 
ently Ovid sang the deathless soul and 
TibuUus gave rendezvous hereafter. The 
atmosphere dripped with wonders. The 
air became charged with the miraculous. 
At stated intervals the doors of temples 
opened of themselves. Statues perspired 
visibly. There was a book that explained 
the mechanism of these marvels. It in- 
terested nobody. Prodigies were matters 
of course. 

The people had a heaven, also a hell, 
both of them Greek, a purgatory that 
may have been Asiatic, and, pending the 
advent of the son of Jove, in Mithra they 
could have had a redeemer. Had it been 
desired. Buddhism could have supplied 
[175] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

gospels, India the trinity, Persia the 
resurrection, Egypt the life. From Iran 
could have been obtained an Intelligence, 
sovereign, unimaged, and just. That was 
unnecessary. Long since Socrates had 
displayed it. In addition, Epicurus had 
told of an ascension of heavens, skies be- 
yond the sky, worlds without number, the 
many mansions of a later faith. 

Meanwhile, austerity was an appanage 
of the stoics, in whose faultless code the 
dominant note was contempt for whatever 
is base, respect for all that is noble. A 
doctrine of great beauty, purely Greek, as 
was everything else in Rome that was 
beautiful, its heights were too lofty for 
the vulgar. It appealed only to the let- 
tered, that is to the few, to the infrequent 
disciples of Zeno and of Cicero, his pro- 
phet, who, Erasmus said, was inspired by 
God. 

[176] 



JUPITER 

It may be that Cicero inspired a few of 
God's preachers. The latter were not 
yet in Rome. Christ had not come. At 
that period, unique in history, man alone 
existed. The temples were thronged, 
but the skies were bare. Cicero knew 
that. Elysium and Hades were as chi- 
merical to him as the Epicurean heavens. 
"People,'' he said, "talk of these places 
as though they had been there." But that 
which was superstition to him he re- 
garded as beneficial for others, who had 
to have something and who got it, in 
temples where a sin was a prayer. 

There was once a play of which there 
has survived but the title: The Last Will 
and Testament of Defunct Jupiter. It 
appeared in the days of Diocletian, but it 
might have appealed when Cicero taught. 
Faith then had fainted. Fright had 
ceased to build. Worship remained, but 
[177] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

religion had gone. The gods themselves 
were departing. The epoch itself was 
apoplectic. The tramp of legions was 
continuous. Not alone the skies but the 
world was in a ferment. It was not until 
a diadem, falling from Cleopatra's golden 
bed, rolled to the feet of Augustus, that 
the gods were stayed and faith revived. 

In the interim, prisoners had been de- 
ported from Judea. At first they were 
slaves. Subsequently manumitted, they 
formed a colony that in the high-viced 
city resembled Esther in the seraglio of 
Ahasuerus. Rome, amateur of cults, al- 
ways curious of foreign faiths, might have 
been interested in Judaism. It had many 
analogies with local beliefs. Its adhe- 
rents awaited, as Rome did, a messiah. 
They awaited too a golden age. For 
those who were weary of philosophy, they 
had a religion in which there was none. 
[178] 



JUPITER 

For those to whom the marvellous ap- 
pealed, they had a history in which 
miracles were a string of pearls. For 
those who were sceptic concerning the 
post-mortem, they offered blankness. In 
addition, their god, the enemy of all 
others, was adapted to an empire that 
recognized no sovereignty but its own. 
Readily might Rome have become He- 
brew. But then, with equal ease, she 
might have become Egyptian. 

For those who were perhaps afraid of 
going to hell and yet may have been 
equally afraid of not going anywhere, 
Egypt held passports to a land of light. 
Then too, the gods of Egypt were friendly 
and accessible. They mingled familiarly 
with those of Rome, complaisantly with 
the deified Caesars, as already they had 
with the pharaohs, a condescension, pa- 
renthetically, that did not protect them 
[179] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

from Tiberius, who, for reasons with 
which religion had nothing whatever to 
do, persecuted the Egyptians, as he per- 
secuted also the Jews. None the less, 
Rome, weary of local fictions, might have 
become converted to foreign ideas. In de- 
fault of Syrian or Copt, she might have be- 
come Persian as already she was Greek. 

Augustus had other views. Divinities, 
made not merely after the image of man 
but in symbols of sin, he saluted. With 
a hand usually small, but in this instance 
tolerably large, he re-established them 
on their pedestals. A relapse to spiritual 
infancy resulted. It was what he sought. 
He wanted to be a god himself and he 
became one. His power and, after him, 
that of his successors, had no earthly 
limit, no restraint human or divine. It 
was the same omnipotence here that else- 
where Jupiter wielded. 
[180] 



JUPITER 

Jupiter had flamens who told him the 
time of day. He had others that read to 
him. For his amusement there were mimes. 
For his delectation, matrons established 
themselves in the Capitol and affected to 
be his loves. But then he was superb. 
Made of ivory, painted vermillion, seated 
colossally on a colossal throne, a sceptre 
in one hand, a thunderbolt in the other, 
a radiating gold crown on his august head, 
and, about his limbs, a shawl of Tyrian 
purple, he looked every inch the god. 

The Caesars, if less imposing, were more 
potent. Their hands, in which there was 
nothing symbolic, held life and death, 
absolute dominion over everything, over 
every one. Jupiter was but a statue. 
They alone were real, alone divine. To 
them incense ascended. At their feet 
libations poured. The nectar fumes con- 
fused. Rome, mad as they, built them 
[181] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

temples, raised them shrines, creating for 
them a worship that they accepted, as 
only their due perhaps, but in which their 
reason fled. In accounts of the epoch 
there is much mention of citizens, sena- 
tors, patricians. Nominally there were 
such people. Actually there were but 
slaves. The slaves had a succession of 
masters. Among them was a lunatic, 
Caligula, and an imbecile, Claud. There 
were others. There was Terror, there 
was Hatred, there was Crime. These 
last, though several, were yet but one. 
Collectively, they were Nero. 

If philosophy ever were needed it was 
in his monstrous day. To anyone, at 
any moment, there might be brought the 
laconic message: Die. In republican 
Rome, philosophy separated man from 
sin. At that period it was perhaps a 
luxury. In the imperial epoch it was a 

[ 182 ] 



JUPITER 

necessity. It separated man from life. 
The philosophy of the republic Cicero 
expounded. That of the empire Seneca 
produced. 

The neo-stoicism of the latter sus- 
tained the weak, consoled the just. It 
was a support and a guide. It preached 
poverty. It condemned wealth. It 
deprecated honours and pleasure. It in- 
culcated chastity, humility, and resigna- 
tion. It detached man from earth. It 
inspired, or attempted to inspire, a desire 
for the ideal which it represented as the 
goal of the sage, who, true child of God,* 
prepared for any torture, even for the 
cross,^ yet, essentially meek,^ sorrowed for 
mankind,^ happy if he might die for it.^ 

In iambics that caressed the ear like 
flutes, poets had told of Jupiter clothed 

* De Provid. i. ^ Cf. Lactantius vi. 17. 

« Epit. cxx. 13 . ^ Lucanus ii. 378. ° Ibidem. 

[ 1S3 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

in purple and glory. They had told of 
his celestial amours, of his human and of 
his inhuman vices. Seneca believed in 
Jupiter. But not in the Jove of the poets. 
That god dwelled in ivory and anapests. 
Seneca^s deity, nowhere visible, was every- 
where present.^ Creator of heaven and 
earth,^ without whom there is nothing,^ 
from whom nothing is hidden,* and to 
whom all belongs,^ our Father,^ whose 
will shall be done.^ 

"Life,'' said Seneca, "is a tribulation, 
death a release. In order not to fear 
death,'' he added, "think of it always." 
The day on which it comes judges all 

^ Nemo novit Deum. Epit. xxxi. Ubique Deus. 
Epit. xli. 

^ Mundum hujus operis dominum et artificem. 
Qusest. nat. i. 

^ Sine quo nihil est. Qusest nat. vii. 31. 

* Nil Deo Clausam. Ep. Ixxxx. 
^ Omnia habentem. Ep. xcv. 

* Parens noster. Ep. ex. 

' Placeat homini quidquid Deo placuit. Ep. Ixxv. 

[184] 



JUPITER 

others.* Meanwhile comfort those that 
sorrow.2 Share your bread with them 
that hunger.^ Wherever there is a hu- 
man being there is place for a good deed.* 
Sin is an ulcer. Deliverance from it is the 
beginning of health — salvation, salu- 
temr ' 

Words such as these suggest others. 
They are anterior to those which they 
recall. The latter are more beautiful, 
they are more ample, there is in them a 
poetry and a profundity that has rarely 
been excelled. Yet, it may be, that a 
germ of them is in Seneca, or, more ex- 
actly, in theories which, beginning in 
India, prophets, seers, and stoics vari- 
ously interpreted and recalled. 

However since they have charmed the 
world, their effect on Nero was curious. 

* Ep. xxvi. 4. ^ De Clem. ii. 6. ^ Ep. xcv. 51. 

* De Vita Beata, 14. ^ Ep. xxviii. 9. 

[185] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

Seneca was his preceptor. But so too 
was Art. The lessons of these teachers, 
fusing in the demented mind of the mon- 
ster, produced transcendental depra\dty, 
the apogee of the abnormal and the epi- 
leptically obscene. WTiat is more im- 
portant, they produced Christianity. 

Christianity already existed in Rome, 
but obscurely, subterraneanly, among 
a class of poor people generally detested, 
particularly by the Jews. Christianity 
was not as yet a religion, it was but the 
belief of a sect that announced that the 
world was to be consumed. Presently 
Rome was. The conflagration, which 
was due to Nero, swept everything sacred 
away. 

Even for a prince that, perhaps, was 
excessive. Nero may have felt that he 
had gone too far. An emperor was omnip- 
otent, he was not inviolable. Tiberius 
[186] 



JUPITER 

was suffocated, Caligula was stabbed, 
Claud was poisoned. Nero, it may be, 
in feeling that he had gone too far, felt 
also that he needed a scapegoat. Chris- 
tian pyromania suggested itself. But 
probably it suggested itself first to the 
Jews, who, Renan has intimated, de- 
nounced the Christians accordingly. Such 
may have been the case. In any event, 
then it was that Christianity received its 
baptism of blood. 

All antiquity was cruel, but, barring 
perhaps the immense Asiatic butcheries, 
Nero contrived then to surpass anything 
that had been done. Bloated and hide- 
ous, his hair done up in a chignon, a con- 
cave emerald for monocle, in the crowded 
arena he assisted at the rape of Christian 
girls. Their lovers, their brothers and 
fathers were either eaten alive by beasts 
or, that night, dressed in tunics that had 
[187] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

been soaked in oil, were fastened to posts 
and set on fire, in order that, as human 
torches, they might illuminate palace 
gardens, through which, costumed as a 
jockey, Nero raced. 

The spectacle in the ampitheatre, which 
fifty thousand people beheld; the suc- 
ceeding festival at which all Rome as- 
sembled, were two acts in the birthday 
of a faith. 

Then, to the cradle, presently, Wise 
Men came with gifts — the gold, the 
frankincense, the myrrh, of creeds an- 
terior though less divine. 



[188] 



I 



VIII 

THE NEC PLUS ULTRA 

T was after fastidious rites, the heart 
entirely devout and on his knees, that 
Angelico di Fiesole drew a picture of the 
Christ. The attitude is emulative. It 
is with brushes dipped in holy water that 
Jesus should be displayed, though more 
reverent still is the absence of any de- 
lineation. 

Reverence of that high character his- 
tory formerly observed. There is no men- 
tion of the Saviour in the chronicles of those 
who were blessed in being his contempo- 
raries. One indiscreet remark of Josephus 
has been recognized as the interpolation 
of a later hand, well-intentioned perhaps, 
[189] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

but misguided. Jesus glows in the Gospels. 
Yet they that awaited the day when, in 
a great aurora borealis, the Son of man 
should appear, had passed from earth be- 
fore one of the evangels was written. 

It was a hundred years later before the 
texts that comprise the New Testament 
were complete. It was nearly two hun- 
dred before they were definitive. In the 
interim many gospels appeared. Attrib- 
uted indifferently to each of the Twelve, 
one was ascribed to Judas. There was 
a Gospel to the Hebrews, a Gospel to the 
Egyptians. There were evangels of 
Childhood, of Perfection and of Mary. 

These primitive memoirs were based 
on oral accounts of occurrences long an- 
terior. Into them entered extraneous 
beauties, felicities of phrase and detail, 
which, with naif effrontery, were put into 
the mouth of one apostle or another, even 
[190] 



THE NEC PLUS ULTRA 

into that of Jesus. The ascription was 
regarded as highly commendable. It was 
but a way of glorifying the Lord. Be- 
sides, the scenarii of these pious evo- 
cations the prophets had traced in ad- 
vance. 

"Rejoice, daughter of Zion; shout, 
daughter of Jerusalem, behold thy King 
Cometh unto thee; he is just and having 
salvation, lowly and riding upon an 
ass.'' 

That king of the poor whom Zachariah 
had foreseen, the stumbling block of 
Israel that Isaiah had foretold, the Son, 
mentioned by Hosea, whom Jahveh had 
called out of Egypt, was the Saviour, 
ascending in glory as Elijah had done. 
A passage incorrectly rendered by the 
Septuagint indicated a virginal birth. 
That also was suggestive. 

The little biographies in which these 
[ 191 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

developments appeared were intended 
for circulation only among an author's 
narrow circle of immediate friends, at 
most to be read aloud in devout reunions. 
If, ultimately, of the entire collection, 
four only were retained, it is probably 
because these best expressed existing con- 
victions. Though, irrespective of their 
beauties, Irenseus said that there had to be 
four and could be but four, for the reason 
that there are four seasons, four winds, 
four corners of the earth, and the four 
revelations of Adam, Noah, Moses, and 
Jesus. 

It is not on that perhaps arbitrary de- 
duction that their validity resides, but 
rather because the parables and miracles 
which they recite became the spiritual 
nourishment of a world. To their title 
of eternal verities they have other and 
stronger claims. They have consoled 
[ 192 ] 



THE NEC PLUS ULTRA 

and they have ennobled. Elder creeds 
may have done likewise, but these lacked 
that of which Christianity was the unique 
possessor, the marvel of a crucified god. 

Saviours there had been. Mithra was 
a redeemer. Zoroaster was born of 
a virgin. Persephone descended into 
hell. Osiris rose from the dead. Go- 
tama was tempted by the devil. Moses 
was transfigured. Elijah ascended into 
heaven. But in no belief is there a 
parallel for the crucifixion, although in 
Hindu legend, Krishna, a divinity whose 
mythical infancy a mythical prototype of 
Herod troubled, died, nailed by arrows 
to a tree. 

In Oriental lore Krishna is held to 
have been the eighth avatar of Vishnu, 
of whom Gotama was the ninth. Krishna 
was therefore anterior to the Buddha, at 
least in myth. But it would be a grave 
[ 193 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

impropriety to infer that with the legend 
concerning him the narrative of the cruci- 
fixion has any other connection than the 
possible one of having suggested it. The 
Bhagavad'Purana^ in which the legend 
occurs, is relatively modern, though the 
legend itself may, like the Tripitaka^ have 
existed orally, for centuries, before it was 
finally committed to writing. 

There can, however, be no impropriety 
in recalling analogies that exist between 
the Saviour and one whom the Orient 
holds also divine. These analogies, set 
forth in the first chapter of the present 
volume, are, it may be, wholly fortuitous, 
though Pliny stated that, centuries before 
his day, disciples of Gotama were estab- 
lished on the Dead Sea and, from a pas- 
sage in Josephus, it seems probable that 
the Essenes were Buddhists, in the same 
degree perhaps that the Pharisees were 
[ 194 ] 



THE NEC PLUS ULTRA 

Parsis. But the point is also obscure. 
It is immaterial as well. The Gospels 
were not written in Jerusalem but mainly 
in Rome, where crucifixions were com- 
mon, as they were, for that matter, through- 
out the East, but where, too, all religions 
were acclimated and the supernatural 
was at home. 

Rome had witnessed the tours de force 
of ApoUonios of Tyana. Those of Simon 
the Magician had also been beheld. 
Rome had seen, or, it may be, thought 
she believed she had seen, Vespasian 
cure the halt and the blind with a touch. 
The atmosphere then was charged with 
the marvellous. The temples were filled 
with prodigies, with strange gods, beckon- 
ing chimeras, credulous crowds. 

There was something superior. Rome 
was the depository of the legends and lore 
of the world. A haunt of the Muses, the 
[195] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

sensual city was a hermitage of philosophy 
as well. These things collectively repre- 
sented a great literary feast, of which not 
all the courses have descended to us, 
though, as is not impossible, a lost dish 
or two, transmuted, by the alchemy of 
faith, from dross into gold, the Gospels 
may perhaps contain. 

In that case there is cause for great 
thankfulness. Moreover, assuming the 
transmutation, no impiety can be implied. 
It was as usual and as indicated as were 
papyrus and the stylus. It is common 
to-day for a poet, before spreading his 
own wings, to contemplate those of an- 
other. Inspiration is infectious. 

A page of verse, whether Hindu, Per- 
sian, Egyptian, Greek, or Latin, was as 
useful then. Dante fed on the trouba- 
dours. They are lost and forgot. He 
divinely stands greater than the tallest 
[196] 



THE NEC PLUS ULTRA 

of them all. In a measure the same may 
be true of those from whom the Gospels 
came. Yet with a very notable differ- 
ence. The Divina Commedia was written 
for all time. So too were the Gospels. 
But not intentionally. They were written 
to prepare man for the immediate ter- 
mination of the world. With the most 
perfect propriety, therefore, anything ser- 
viceable could have been utilized and 
probably was. The devout had but to 
lift their eyes. In the words of Isaiah, 
there, before them, were the treasures 
of nations; there were the camels and 
dromedaries bearing from every side in- 
cense and gold; there were the sons of 
strangers to build up their walls. 

The sons were many, the treasures as 

great. Even otherwise there was the 

Law, there too were the Prophets. Moses 

fasted for forty days. Elisha performed 

[ 197 ] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

a miracle of the loaves, if he did not that 
of the fishes. Job saw the Lord walking 
upon the sea. Jeremiah said : " Seek and 
ye shall find.'' Isaiah bid those that 
sorrowed come and be consoled. In the 
poem of that poet the servant of the Lord 
had vinegar when he thirsted, he was 
spat upon and for his garments lots were 
cast. 

In an effort to fill in a picture of which 
the central figure had passed from the 
real to the ideal, these things may have 
been suggestive. So also, perhaps, was 
the Talmud. The redaction of that chaos 
began in the second century. But the 
Vedas, the Homeric poems, the Tripitaka 
as well, existed in memory long before 
they were committed to writing. The 
same is true of the Talmud. Orally it 
existed prior to the Christ. Considered 
as literature, if it may be so considered, 
[198] 



THE NEC PLUS ULTRA 

it is the reverse of endearing. But of the 
many maxims that it contains there are 
some of singular charm. Among others 
is the Lay not up for yourselves treasures 
on earth.* The origin of that, as already 
indicated, is traceable to the Tripitaka^ 
which, parenthetically, were so well known 
in Babylon that Gotama was there re- 
garded as a Chaldean seer. That abridge- 
ment of the Law which is called the 
Golden Rule is also in the Talmud,^ as 
also, before the Talmud was, it was in 
the Tripitaka. The injunction to love 
one's enemies is equally in both. So is 
the very excellent suggestion that one 
should consider one's own faults before 
admonishing a brother concerning his 
defects. But the perhaps subtle intima- 
tion that the desire to commit adultery 

* Talmud Babli: Baba bathra, 11 a. 
2 Schabbath, 37 a. 

[199] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

is as reprehensible as the act, and the 
rather extravagant statement that it is 
easier for a camel to pass through the eye 
of a needle than for a rich man to enter 
the kindgom of heaven, these, originally, 
were perhaps uniquely Talmudic. Cur- 
rently cited with multiple others they were 
all so many common sayings, which, 
strung together in the Gospels, became 
a rosary of most perfect pearls. 

In a passage of Irenseus it is stated that 
the Gospel according to St. Matthew was 
arranged by the Church for the benefit 
of the Jews who awaited a Messiah de- 
scended from David. A Syro-Chaldaic 
evangel, known as the Gospel to the He- 
brews, had then appeared. So also had 
the Gospel according to St Mark. But 
these offered no evidence that Jesus was 
the one they sought. Another was then 
prepared. Written in Greek and bear- 
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ing the authoritative name of Matthew, it 
traced from David, Joseph's descent. 

The narrative continued: "Now the 
birth of Jesus Chirst was in this wise. 
When as his mother Mary was espoused 
to Joseph, before they came together, she 
was found with child by the Holy Ghost. 
Then Joseph her husband being a just 
man and not willing to make her a publick 
example, was minded to put her away 
privily. But while he thought on these 
things, behold, the angel of the Lord 
appeared unto him in a dream, saying, 
Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to 
take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that 
which is conceived in her is of the Holy 
Ghost." 

The genealogy completed, though per- 
haps inadequately, since Jesus, not being 
a son of Joseph, could not have descended 
from David, the Church continued : '' Now 
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THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

all this was done that it might be fulfilled 
which was spoken of the Lord by the 
prophet saying, Behold a virgin shall be 
with child and shall bring forth a son and 
call his name Emmanuel/' 

The prophecy mentioned occurs in 
Isaiah vii, 14. In the King James ver- 
sion it is as follows ; " Behold a virgin shall 
conceive and bear a son and shall call 
his name Immanuel/' But the Aramaic 
reading is: "Behold an ^almd shall con- 
ceive/' 'Alma means young woman. 
The Septuagint, in translating it, em- 
ployed the term TTapdevo% or maiden. In 
Matthew the term was retained. 

Matthew, at the time, had long been 
dead. Even had he been living it is im- 
probable that he could write in Greek. 
Unfortunately there were others who 
could not only write Greek but read He- 
brew, In particular, there was a rabbi 
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Aquila who retranslated Isaiah with no 
other purpose than the mahgn object of 
definitely re-establising the exact expres- 
sion which the old poet had used.^ 

It was presumably in these circum- 
stances that the Evangel of Mary was 
advanced. Among other elucidations, 
the work contained professional testimony 
of the immaculacy that was claimed. 
Additionally, in reparation of the earlier 
oversight, the Virgin was genealogically 
descended from the royal line. 

That, however, is apocryphal, and if, 
regarding the other genealogy, exegesis 
has since obscured the luminousness of the 
method adapted by the Church, the latter 's 
intention was none the less irreproachable, 
and that alone imports. Before it, before 
the miracle of the nativity and the divine 
episodes of the transfiguration, crucifixion, 

^ Renan : Les Evangiles. 
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THE LORDS OF THE GH05TLAXD 

resurrection, and ascension, reverently the 
Occident has knelt. They are indeed 
di%'ine. If thev did not occur in Judea, 
they have occurred ever since. Con- 
tinuously, in the hearts of the devout, they- 
are repeated. 

Unhappily there were heretics then as 
now. To the Gnostics, Jesus was an 
^on that had never been. To the Doce- 
tists, he was a phantasm. There are 
alwavs brutes that can believe but in the 
reahtv of thing's. There are others to 
whom the symbolic is dumb. In the 
Gospels there is much that is figurative, 
there is more that is ineflFable, there are 
suggestions sheerly ideal. 

*'In my Father's house are many man- 
sions,'' the Saviour declared. In his 
own ministrv there are as manv hghts. 
He was a vagrant and he created pure 
sentiment. He was a nihihst and he 
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inspired a new conception of life. He 
said he had not come to destroy and he 
changed the face of the earth. He re- 
mitted the sins of a harlot and condemned 
both marriage and love. There are other 
antitheses, deeper contradictions. These 
perhaps are more apparent than real. 
Behind them there may have been the 
co-ordination of a central thought. Of 
many gospels but few remain. Among the 
lost evangels was one that Valentinian said 
was imparted only to the more spiritual of 
the disciples. It may be that in it a main 
idea was elucidated and, perhaps, as a con- 
sequence, the meaning of the esoteric proc- 
lamation: "Before Abraham was I am.'' 
Yet though now the authoritative ex- 
planation be lacking, its significance seems 
to run beneath the texts. At the first 
apparition of Jesus, the chief preoccupa- 
tion of those that stood about was what 
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THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

prophet of the old days had returned 
in the new. Some thought him Ehjah. 
Others Jeremiah. Antipas feared that 
he was the Baptist revived. Jesus him- 
self asked the disciples whom he was said 
to be. Later he assured them that the 
awaited return of Elijah had been accom- 
plished in John. That assurance, to- 
gether with the perplexities regarding 
him and the esoteric announcement which 
he made concerning himself, can hardly 
indicate anything else than a belief in 
reincarnation. 

The belief, common to all antiquity, 
though not necessarily valid on that 
account, is not discernible in Hebrew 
thought, perhaps for the reason that it is 
not perceptible in Babylonian. Yet the 
myth of Eden barely conceals it. It is 
almost obvious in the allegory of Beth-el. 
Solomon said: "I was set up from ever- 
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lasting, from the beginning or ever earth 
was." If the idea contained in that 
statement was not a part of the phi- 
losophy attributed to the Christ, it might 
have been. The amount of beauty stored 
in it is more enormous than in any 
other. 

To the materialist the beauty is mean- 
ingless. To the mathematician it has 
the value of a zero from which the pe- 
riphery has gone. But at the Pillars of 
Hercules early geographers put on their 
maps : Hie deficit orbis — Here ends the 
world. They had no suspicion that be- 
yond that world there stretched another 
twice as great. Materialists may be 
equally naif. On the other hand, they 
may not be. The theory of reincarna- 
tion is one that transcends the limits of 
experience. 

Of the many tenets of the belief there 
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THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

are but two with which the matter-of- 
fact agrees. One of them concerns the 
conservation of energy, the other the 
negation of death. Theory and practice 
unite in admitting that the supply of 
energy is invariable. Constantly it is 
transformed and as constantly transposed, 
but whether it enter into fungus or star, 
into worm or man, the loss of a particle 
never occurs. Death consequently is but 
the constituent of a change. When it 
comes, that which was living assumes a 
state that has in it the potentiality of 
another form. A tenement has crumbled 
and a tenant gone forth. Though just 
where is the riddle. 

In the thousand and one nights that 
were less astronomic than our own, it 
was thought that the riddle was answered. 
Poets had erected an edifice of verse and 
called it Creation. In the strophes of 
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the epic the earth was a flat and station- 
ary parallelogram. About the earth, and 
uniquely for its benefit, sun, moon and 
stars paraded. Above was a deity one or 
multiple. Below were places of vivid dis- 
comfort. To the latter, or to the former, 
the soul of man proceeded. There were 
no other resorts. Creation had its limits. 

Poets younger yet more gray have 
presented a different conception. In the 
glare of a million million of suns they 
have sent the earth spinning like a midge. 
Beyond the uttermost horizon they have 
strewn other systems, other worlds; be- 
yond the latter, more. Wherever imagi- 
ination in its weariness would set a limit, 
there is space begun. 

There too is energy. Throughout the 
stretch of universes the same force pul- 
sates that is recognizable here. A deduc- 
tion is obvious. Throughout infinity are 
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THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

sentient beings, perhaps our brothers, 
perhaps ourselves. 

The obvious, very frequently, is mis- 
leading. But the dream of precipitation 
into that wonderful tornado of worlds 
has the merit of more colourful idealism 
than that which was formerly displayed. 
Taken but as an hypothesis, it holds 
suggestions ampler than any other con- 
veys. It intimates that just as the butter- 
fly rises from the chrysalis, so does the 
spiritual rise from the flesh. It indicates 
that just as the sun cannot set, so is it 
impossible for death to be. 

There are topics about which words 
hover like enchanted bees. Death is 
one of them. Mediaevally it was repre- 
sented by a skeleton to which prose had 
given a rictus, poetry a scythe, and phi- 
losophy wings. From its eyries it swooped 
spectral and sinister. Previously it was 
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more gracious. In Greece it resembled 
Eros. Among its attributes was beauty. 
It did not alarm. It beckoned and con- 
soled. The child of Night, the brother 
of Sleep, it was less funereal than nar- 
cotic. The theory of it generally was 
beneficent. But not enduring. In the 
change of things death lost its charm. 
It became a sexless nightmare-frame of 
bones topped by a grinning skull. That 
perhaps was excessive. In epicurean 
Rome it was a marionnette that invited 
you to wreathe yourself with roses before 
they could fade. In the Muslim East it 
was represented by Azrael, who was an 
angel. In Vedic India it was represented 
by Yama, who was a god. But mediae- 
vally in Europe the skeleton was preferred. 
Since then it has changed again. It is 
no longer a spectral vampire. It has 
acquired the serenity of a natural law. 
[211] 



THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

Regarding the operation of that law there 
are perhaps but three vahd conjectures. 
Rome entertained all of them. There, 
there was a tomb on which was written 
Umbra. Before it was another on which 
was engraved Nihil. Between the two 
was a portal behind which the Nee plus 
ultra stood revealed. 

The portal, fashioned by the philoso- 
phy of ages, still is open, wider than be- 
fore, on vaster horizons and unsuspected 
skies. Through it one may see the expli- 
cation of things ; the reason why men are 
not born equal, why some are rich and 
some are poor, why some are weak 
and some are strong, why some are wise 
and many are not. One may see there too 
the reason of joys and sorrows, the cause 
of tears and smiles. One may see also 
how the soul changes its raiment and how 
it happens to have a raiment to change. 
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One may see all these things, and others 
besides, in the revelation that this life, 
being the refuse of many deaths, has 
acquired merits and demerits in accord- 
ance with which are present punishments 
and rewards. 

In proportion as these are utilized or 
disregarded, so perhaps is retrogression 
induced or progress achieved. But not 
in Hades or yet in Elysium. These were 
the inventions of man for his brother. 
So also was the very neighbourly heaven 
which the early Church devised. But 
because that has gone from the sidereal 
chart, it does not follow that there is no 
such place. Because there is nothing 
alarming under the earth, it does not 
follow that hell has ceased to be. On the 
contrary. Both are constant, though it be 
but in the heart. 

In the light of reincarnation it is 
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THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 

probable that neither can occur there with 
out anterior cause. But probably too it is 
the preponderance of either that creates 
the mystery of life, as it may also fore- 
shadow the portent of death. 

Death, it may be, is not merely a law 
but a place, perhaps a garage which the 
traveller reaches on a demolished motor, 
but whence none can proceed until all old 
scores are paid. Pending payment, there, 
perhaps the soul must wait. But the bill 
of its past acquitted, it may be that then it 
shall be free to pursue on trillions of spheres 
the diversified course of endless life — free 
to pass from world to world, from beati- 
tude to bliss, from transformation to 
transfiguration, from the transitory to 
the eternal; weaving, meanwhile, a gar- 
land of migrations that stretch from sky 
to sky, marrying its memoirs with those 
of the universe, and, finally, from some 
[ 214 ] 



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ultimate zenith, reviewing, as it easts 
them aside, the masks of concluded in- 
carnations. 

The prospect, overwhelming in beauty, 
is really divine. The divine is always 
Utopian. But there is the supreme Al- 
hambra of dream. It exceeds any other, 
however excessive another may be. It is 
the Nee "plus vltra. Into it all may 
wander and never weary of the wonders 
that are there. It may be unrealizable, 
but for that very reason it must be also 
ideal. 



Finis Historijb Deorum 



[215] 



APR S 1907 



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